I liked this more than most seem to

I've just seen this for the first time, and I think it's quite a remarkable version of the story.

The cinematography and art design is powerful. It inhabits the same world as mid-century illustrated Bibles, sure, a kind of fantasy Palestine that never quite existed, but I don't mind that. And most of the casting works extremely well, I felt — notables for me were Claude Rains, Charlton Heston and Telly Savalas, and Max von Sydow himself. Unlike many people on this thread, I liked von Sydow's Jesus — I felt it had intensity and clarity without being fraught or being lost in that overly meek forebearance that often seems laid on too thick in depictions of Jesus, and his slight accent actually worked for this role, I thought — I never found it distracting, it seemed to make him more direct and clear about the specific words he was saying, and it was just enough to give a physical representation of the idea of "there's something different about him".

I liked the script a lot, with a few caveats: I think it tells the narrative accessibly and succinctly, but it doesn't allow for much in terms of character development. None of the disciples seem to become more than cardboard cutouts — crucially, Judas seems to go from being doe-eyed to slit-eyed to being a traitor, with no stops in-between. It seems to be doing a Mel Gibson, and requiring the audience to bring enormous amounts of prior knowledge to watching the film in order for it to work. To me, the best scenes in the film were when the script fleshed out events (such as the sequence at Lazarus' tomb, or Jesus' reassurance of the women on his way to Golgotha) that the Bible tells only cursorily.

There were a few small disappointments in the casting: most of the celebrity cameos, of course, but some of the regular performances as well. One tiny one, in that Roddy McDowell, much as I love seeing him, is just too darned nice to be convincing to me as a thick-skinned tax-collector who's turned his back on allegiance to his own people; and while I generally like David McCallum as an actor, I really got nothing from his Judas (though that could have been more the fault of the script; he didn't get a lot of time to develop his opposition to Jesus, and the film never really suggested a reason for his betraying him, other than the fact that he was ... well, a bit grumpy).

Most of the production was spectacular, but a couple of things didn't work well for me technically: Stevens' having to make do with sound stages and dioramas for the last act of the film was a bit of a clunky transition, though I understand that wasn't by choice; I didn't care for the coloured filter during the entire Resurrection sequence (it was probably cleverly evocative right enough, but I personally find such things distracting and alienating from a film); and I didn't care for the use of potted well-known classical music, though most viewers would obligingly accept this kind of musical semaphor, I suspect, inserting their own emotional overlay onto the scene based on what they understand that music to mean, rather than deriving a direct emotional response from an original score.

Last stray thoughts: For me, the raising of Lazarus was the highlight scene of the film, and I really loved Stevens' idea of the ripple effect that ran down the hillside, as people were shocked to realise that they had witnessed something genuinely supernatural. A beautiful bit of film-making, I thought. And lastly, I couldn't quite decide whether making Donald Pleasance's Satan the agent provocateur for so many moments — agitating the crowd against both Jesus and John the Baptist on numerous occasions, emboldening the Sanhedrin, calling for the crucifixion, causing Peter to deny Jesus — was a neat bit of cinematic shorthand, or a cop-out. Mel Gibson seems to have copied the idea, so he must have liked it as an explanation, but I think it's too pat and is essentially buck-passing.

The positives far outweigh any reservations, though, and overall I thoroughly enjoyed this.



You might very well think that. I couldn't possibly comment.