☆:::::::::::::::::::::::::REEBY::::::::::::::::::::::::::☆

This is...a really bad movie? Like, I knew going in that it was controversial and polarising, but I didn't expect it to be so badly made. Tonally it is straight-up incompetent: Gibson seems to want every moment that's drawn from the gospels to be equally weighty, meaning there are no lulls to make the crescendos stand out, so everything kind of just blurs into a sound-wall of emotional bombast. But then at the same time he seems more concerned about preserving the dignity of his characters than connecting us to their humanity, so we end up with all these ridiculously muted reaction scenes, like Mary watching her son get scourged half to death with only a single tasteful tear rolling down her cheek. Satan is depicted as a very pale twink with no eyebrows whose MO is to gently verbally discourage Jesus from going through with the sacrifice while menacingly stroking his pet snake. Judas gets mauled by a werewolf, I think? But then he's fine? (It happens very fast, in the dark, then cuts straight back to Jesus getting tormented. So IDK.)

I will grant that the violence itself is very brutal, and I guess if this was your first exposure to the gruesome historical realities of crucifixion, then the film might blow your socks off on those grounds alone. But the characters are so lifeless and the Satan stuff so cartoonish that I find it hard to take seriously even with my strong religious predisposition to do so.

On a more nitpicky note, I'm also annoyed by the Romans speaking Ecclesiastical instead of Classical Latin. Strictly speaking in that part of the empire at that time they should have been using Greek, but I can forgive the filmmakers preferring Latin for the sake of mainstream audiences; what I can't forgive is them not bothering to look up even the basics of classical pronunciation that any first year student from a half-competent classics department could have helped them with. I was SO ON BOARD for the idea of a script written entirely in ancient languages, but if you're going to make life so much harder for yourself in the first place, why the fuck would you not put in just that little bit of extra effort to do the thing properly? If that's how little thought or care Gibson put into his handling of the very accessible, widely studied Latin language then I shudder to think how bad his reconstructed Aramaic must be.

So, yeah. Unimpressed to say the least. I got about halfway through last night and will probably watch the rest tonight so as not to waste the $2.99 I spent on digital rental, but I did NOT expect to be this bored by the all-time most famously graphic film depiction of the central event of my faith.