Reviews

Just looking at the poster for the movie one has to cringe. What you have here is very embarrassing over the top right-wing propaganda. Very dumb and laughable. The assumptions made in the movie are based on essentially lies and a perverse longing for an alternate reality. I might include this movie in another movie about a future Orwellian dystopia.

I have a fairly calm enough demeanor to sit down and enjoy a movie such as this particularly if I enjoy the subject matter. The first half of the movie was interesting watching McGregor develop the character but if you are watching a movie about Jesus, the savior of the world you expect a little more than an ineffective, indecisive individual in a quandary over typical human problems. Hello! Jesus was supposed to be one of the wisest men that ever lived, oh yea, even more than a man as you have heard and I don't think He just got wise between the desert and walking out. Family counseling should have been a breeze. And so you are telling me that he does not have more direction for this family than an occasional minor tid-bit of timid advice.

Once that character realization sets in and the downbeat, even depresso soundtrack establishes itself the movie for me is setting on thin ice. I love to give movies a chance because i have seen many pull themselves out of some real nosedives but not here. The ending just drags the movie down into the ditch of what ever it was supposed to mean.

So Jesus, the Son of God cannot pull a man up and save him from a fatal fall and then leaves a woman abandoned in the desert not long after her son abandons her meaning Jesus fully abandoned her when he walked away. Did He leave her for dead or did he heal her and then leave her abandoned and alone in the desert? As Jesus leaves the tent the devil blurts out "who do you think you are?", so apparently Jesus did heal her but still left her. Not the Jesus most of us know.

For the Christian this movie would have zero inspiration and for anyone else there is little reason to even investigate this man from Galilee. If someone is wanting to bum others out on Jesus then this would be an effective movie and is the one effective thing about it.

As for the ending it reflects the typical "realist" skeptic view that Jesus was only a man. A crucifixion, a burial and then apparently Mary and her entourage waiting outside the tomb and then no resurrection or anything even symbolizing it. A hummingbird floats just in front of Jesus's face as he dies on the cross. Nice touch but.... If the director wants to show tourists at the same location on the cliff where the father died and i take it that is what is intended then fine but is this story of Jesus just a story out of history where tourists come to take pictures or is there more?

Not in this movie.

The criticism that the lead characters lack depth and the storyline becomes muddled is warranted but any criticism that the story is uninteresting comes from those with little imagination. This is a universe where corporations rule over various planets and the inhabitants of most of the planets are harvested in order to create a fountain of youth serum provided essentially to the ruling 1%. Earth can be sparred this horrific end only if Jupiter Jones prevails as the "owner" of Earth. You may not be so emotionally drawn into it but you do have reason to see Jupiter prevail, that is if you want the earth to survive. Along the way Jupiter Ascending weaves into it the notion of the purpose of alien grays and abductions along with a darker view of what a final harvest of the Earth means relative to many religious doctrines. The Christian version speaks of a final harvest where the great mass of people are cast into destruction except for a very few. This is consistent with the movie version except that in the movie the veneer of our religious version is cast aside for the harsh reality of the supposed real universe. This should be interesting for most inquisitive spiritual minds and those curious about the state of reality. In this sense the movie is in fact deep and thought provoking but certain critics just have no imagination to go there. Unless they haven't noticed 90 percent of the world's population is religious. You have got to love the Wachowskis desire to explore the possibilities of what is reality. That for me makes the movie extremely interesting. This movie is not only an exercise of the visual but also of the mind. It has it's detraction but the positive outweighs the negative. For that reason I give it a 7. Even if you don't find the movie interesting or profound you should have a lot of fun just watching it. That is worth the price of admission. For those that have the money to spare I would suggest the IMAX version at least once and get blown away. Enjoy!

To put yourself through this movie is to depress yourself. It is morose, bleak and without real hope as it get dirtier and dingier along the way. It felt like a grind in the beginning and it never lets up. There is no hero here just repulsive characters that keep you looking for someone else to enter the movie and I'm sure some wax romantic with the retrograde realism but we get enough of that every day don't we? You might call this a movie for hillbillies on smack. Throughout the movie the same question is asked four or five times in excruciatingly slow dialogue as the dumbness in the air becomes suffocating. If you could allow yourself to be drawn into these characters it might work on one level but you really don't want to go anywhere near them and so. Maybe just maybe the real "Deliverance" bunch would love it.

Seeing no obvious connections to anything Christian in the opening credits made me wonder but the general obscurity of the film company and studios left open the possibility of an independent Christian studio. Is Nicolas Cage now a Christian? I thought this was going to be a parody of the Left Behind movie but that wasn't working so I considered that it could be a critique of Christian judgment mentality in it's interpretation of Revelation but that did not materialize. Could they really have made such a milquetoast mediocre remake of Left Behind? Why do this? I guess they thought they had the right to do it in hopes of raking in cash from the broad Christian community but it is only right that the movie was panned by left/right, Christian and secular critics. The only possible use for this movie is for making Christian movie makers and Christians in general look stupid. A movie about the coming of Jesus and His name is not mentioned once. The only consolation from it comes in the end when they play a cover of Larry Norman's "I Wish We'd All Been Ready". Sure would like to know how Cage responded when asked about this flop.