Twenty minutes in to an empty auditorium. I was ready to go. I have in my fifty years only ever walked out on one movie. This would've been the second, but my wife insisted we made the most of our evening out together and stuck with it. Forty minutes later she had fell asleep and I was stuck watching it.
The self indulgence of the director was overwhelming, the script had no inspiration, you kind of literally expect "inpsiration" in a religious film.
The scenery... was it filmed in Ireland or something, I can't remember a scene with sand or sun. Making it a miserable film even more miserable by its dull Northern European weather.
So, how about the story of Mary Magdelane. Nothing...not a jot, no intrigue, no character development, just a stale one sided cardboard woman who decides to join a bunch of travelers passing through her town because they wanted to put some sort of woman's rights swing into the film to connect with modern movements that simply didn't fit in the movie. It picked out key points in the forty plus year old Jesus...didn't he die at 33? He,s looking rough for a 33 year old. Maybe they should have gone for the cultural appropriation angle instead of the women's movement one to apease it pc wallies, since not a single character had correct features for that part of the world.
Don't get me wrong, actors act and play people who are not them, so I don't cave to this nonsense. But it did stand out that all the characters wer western, even the extras virtually.
So yeas, basically about five seminal moments from the Jesus story, blind man made to see, Lazarus raised from the dead, last supper, betrayed with a kiss, crucified and saw in the garden at gethsemane....that's the Jesus story, we all know that... in between you would have thought they would've kind of created at least some interesting stuf about Mary Magdalene ? You'd have thought. No 5his one dimensional, "I will be faithfully by your side" character basically opposes any credit they had at women's individuality as she follows Jesus around like a sheep, listening to him whine about his lot in life...I wouldn't want hang around with him for ten minutes, let alone follow him and launch a new era of religious doctrine. The only really information that developed MM in any way was at the end, after the film, where it does the what happened next text on screen, where it tells us that MM was recognised by the Vatican as an apostle recently and not as the whore she is popularly credited as, as that now becomes documentary evidence that she or any of the others even existed.
There is so much interesting and great esoteric concepts in many books about MM that could've at least been posed...but they left this all out for a boring film discussing the most boring in between gaps of the key points of Jesus story mentioned above that without that context could've easily been about Brian, or any other prophet wandering around "Ireland" 2000 years ago...I can't be bothered looking where it was filmed, but Blackpool beach would've been more convincing.
Nothing, but nothing interesting or new, or dynamic about this film. It's quite possibly the dullest film ever made.
Don't get me wrong, actors act and play people who are not them, so I don't cave to this nonsense. But it did stand out that all the characters wer western, even the extras virtually.
So yeas, basically about five seminal moments from the Jesus story, blind man made to see, Lazarus raised from the dead, last supper, betrayed with a kiss, crucified and saw in the garden at gethsemane....that's the Jesus story, we all know that... in between you would have thought they would've kind of created at least some interesting stuf about Mary Magdalene ? You'd have thought. No 5his one dimensional, "I will be faithfully by your side" character basically opposes any credit they had at women's individuality as she follows Jesus around like a sheep, listening to him whine about his lot in life...I wouldn't want hang around with him for ten minutes, let alone follow him and launch a new era of religious doctrine. The only really information that developed MM in any way was at the end, after the film, where it does the what happened next text on screen, where it tells us that MM was recognised by the Vatican as an apostle recently and not as the whore she is popularly credited as, as that now becomes documentary evidence that she or any of the others even existed.
There is so much interesting and great esoteric concepts in many books about MM that could've at least been posed...but they left this all out for a boring film discussing the most boring in between gaps of the key points of Jesus story mentioned above that without that context could've easily been about Brian, or any other prophet wandering around "Ireland" 2000 years ago...I can't be bothered looking where it was filmed, but Blackpool beach would've been more convincing.
Nothing, but nothing interesting or new, or dynamic about this film. It's quite possibly the dullest film ever made.