The Passion Cont.'d

I'd like to follow up the story of my experience with The Passion of the Christ last week with some of my thoughts on the film.

This was a film with a lot of potential. With excellent cinematography, quality actors, and a great vision, The Passion could have served as a wonderful way of sharing the story of Jesus. However, as I alluded in my Friday entry, the violence just takes it too far.

Throughout the film, I waited for some brilliant scenes that would get people re-viewing and re-considering the person of Jesus, but instead, there is a lot of blood and gore with almost no explanation of why this happens to the character of Jesus. These are some of the chief complaints that I've heard from unchurched viewers of the film:

"Why do these people hate him so much? Just because he said that he was God?"

"What's up with that whole scene where the people drop stones and that girl goes to Jesus' feet?"

I understand that this is supposed to create conversation with believers and get people inquiring into the Jesus story, but I simply feel that the The Passion would have been much more powerful if it focused more on these events than the extremely filmic and unrealistic violence.

I can also understand why people would fear this film's ability to incite anti-Semitism. Most of the dialogue in The Passion is verbatim from the Gospel accounts. However, unless you know of the conflict between Jesus (a Jew) and the Jewish religious system, you might not understand why this particular Jewish religious leader character set (not all Jews in the film) would call for Jesus' death. Without the knowledge of what happens prior to the Torture and Crucifixion, one might think this film portrays Jews in a terrible light.

Kudos to Mel for a visually stunning and well-acted film. As I've mentioned before, the violence makes it too much for me to even think of using it as a conversational tool.