The Passion of the Christ (2004)

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The Passion of the Christ Movie Review

The Passion of the Christ is a 2004 historical drama film directed by Mel Gibson and starring Jim Caviezel. It is a controversial film that polarized me as well.

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“Forgive them, Father. They know not what they do“

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It depicts the last days of Jesus, but mostly focuses on his torture. And there naturally lies a problem. Let me elaborate on this. While I honestly admire the film for showing his torture as in this case it should be showed because it is so important and thus it achieves realism, I still disliked its immense violence and found it to be needless. The film should be violent, but not this violent as it crossed the line for me as was the case with many people.

But the bigger problem is that the film relies too much on that torture and rarely deals with other aspects of the story which is why it is such an oddity. I wouldn’t call it a documentary, but I certainly wouldn’t call it a live-action movie either. His trial and torture should have been emphasized, but the film should have never become just that and thus it lacks in terms of the storytelling, emotion and message.

Yes, The Passion of the Christ is far from a religious movie. And it is certainly not a good thing when you make a movie about Jesus and not make it religious. There are some religious overtones here for sure and they are mostly well handled, but those still came few and far between. It needed a strong message about tolerance and love instead of honestly being too hateful at times. And I never felt anything spiritual in it.

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The acting is really strong, but I still found the actor choice to be troublesome as both the actor and the characterization felt wrong and too harsh for a man that should be calmer and gentler. But everyone did give a pretty good performance which is commendable as they spoke in dead languages.

And now we come to the best part of this movie, the one that is the most admirable aspect of it and that is its usage of dead languages – Aramaic, Latin and Hebrew. I just adored that as usually bit Hollywood productions like this tend to use English, but this one used the correct languages and it felt all the more real for it.

And surely all of the technical aspects in The Passion are splendid. The photography is really good as are the make-up effects. The costumes are authentic for the time period and the actors felt like real people from that time. The direction from Gibson is expectedly strong and the film is overall really well made.

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I liked the dialogue in it and the pacing is mostly good, but the flashback structure was frankly clichéd and annoying. It wasn’t a good approach at all. The tone is too hateful instead of being optimistic, at least in its ending. It is a giant hate letter to all mankind, but the emphasis is on the word hate and it never makes a statement or teaches you something. It is a very authentic and sometimes admirable movie, but it is also too violent and too slight to be enjoyed more. It left a polarizing effect on me as I neither hate it nor love it.

The Passion of the Christ is a very polarizing movie. On the one hand, you’ve got awesome technical aspects from the costumes to the acting to the direction and of course the use of original languages is so commendable. On the other hand, you have a movie that is realistic in its violence, but still too violent to the point of being exploitative. But the biggest problem is its hateful tone, a lack of a strong story and the movie’s unwillingness to make a strong statement or to have anything truly spiritual in it as the movie about Jesus needs those things. So in the end, I respect it to some degree as it is authentic, but I also find it to be too problematic in too many areas.