Jesus Movie

I decided to watch Passion of the Christ this week, expecting great things after generally hearing about it a lot, and was sadly some what let down. When I was reading the summary of these movies, I thought that the last 12 hours of Jesus' life sounded very interesting and would make for a good film. It seems that the 2 hour movie focused almost exclusively on the hours Jesus spent dying on the Cross, with little in depth storytelling before or after.. The use of close-ups throughout the movie was nice as it made the viewer feel like they were in the room with the disciples rather than just watching what they were doing. I did like also how the disciples looked like they were really living on nothing, preaching the message of their mentor. Often times these Christian films, will have them looking like they just came out of the shower in time to shoot the scene. The actors, especially Jesus (James Caviezel) all did a fantastic, and the movie overall was very well cast. The cinematography and directing I thought was very good as well. While all of these things worked well, it was the storyline I had a problem with. I felt like the 12 last hours could have been such a cool idea to see the shift of emotion from the beginning to the end of the movie making one sort of big circle with the Resurrection. While there definitely was emotion, I felt that Gibson was so focused on making everything seem so realistic, that the details of the story rather than the blood on Jesus' body got lost. The film was gory, and while probably was very realistic, was at the same time over the top. I like the fact that Gibson did not make this movie like every other happy, everything is okay, Easter film, but I think he was trying so hard that it went a little too far past the mark. When there is a close-up of Jesus on the cross being whipped you really connect with him, that is if you can handle what is being shown on the screen. It is definitely a very different take on that part of Jesus' life, and overall was a good movie, but definitely not my favorite for the reasons mentioned earlier.
Rate: 6/10