Movies about Jesus in the past have been a mixed bag. Some have not been faithful to the letter or the spirit of the Gospels, but even those that were faithful often had other significant flaws. Some just did not look very professional and lacked an air of realism, possibly because of budget limitations. Others failed to communicate effectively the importance and drama of the events involved. Virtually all of them were unable to fill the part of Jesus adequately, ultimately using actors who, however much talent they may have had for other roles, simply were not believable in the role of Jesus.

The Passion of the Christ does not have these problems. Mel Gibson spent approximately $25 million making this movie, and it has the realistic look of a major Hollywood production. Many of the actors are relative unknowns, with the exceptions of Jim Caviezel as Jesus and Monica Bellucci as Mary Magdalene, but the acting is good throughout. From the foggy gloom of the garden of Gethsemane to the reflection of morning sun inside the opening tomb, the scenes painted in this movie are very nearly perfect. Cinematography, makeup, costumes, and all the things that go into making a film visually impressive were done spectacularly well here. Indeed, the whole movie is very artistic, and as many have noted it seems to borrow heavily from the spirit of some of the Renaissance painters.

The acting overall is good, but Jim Caviezel in the role of Jesus is simply incredible. Some may object that his face was barely visible through all the blood for much of the movie, but that misses the point that the part of Jesus is still always the most difficult part for an actor to play successfully. It is difficult just to step on camera in the character of Jesus and not instantly seem inadequate, if not laughable. Caviezel manages this and more.

Gibson reportedly originally intended to release this movie without subtitles, but later decided that they were necessary. After viewing the movie, I think it is clear that releasing it without subtitles never would have worked. There are occasions when no subtitles are necessary to grasp the general meaning of what is being said, and in these case the subtitles are sometimes omitted. However, a significant portion of the dialogue would have been impossible to follow without subtitles, even for those who are very familiar with the Gospel narratives. When The Passion is released on DVD I expect it will be possible to watch it without subtitles, and that would be interesting after seeing the version with subtitles, so that one is already familiar with the dialogue in the movie.

As I indicated earlier in my review, knowledge of the story of Jesus is necessary for this movie to make sense. Without that, the motivations of almost everyone in the movie, from Caiphas to Jesus Himself, will seem mysterious or nonsensical. As beautifully made as the movie is, Gibson clearly wished to focus exclusively on the Passion, and of course the Passion is meaningless outside of its context. In order to tell the story of the Passion in a movie in the way that he envisioned, Gibson just had to take for granted that the audience would be familiar with the basic beliefs of Christianity about the life of Jesus.

If you are Christian, the emotional impact of this movie may be beyond expression. I found myself in tears a number of times during the movie. Granted, I'm the sort of person who does occasionally cry in movies. Many scenes stuck with me, but the one that is in my mind right now is the moment when Mary encounters Jesus as He is carrying the Cross, and He turns His battered and bloodied face to her and says "See, Mother, I make all things new." What a moment--there is just so much there in that scene and those words. Also particularly effective were several scenes in which the camera angle is such that, while Jesus is looking at or speaking to someone else in the movie, He appears to be looking directly at the audience. These included (among others) one scene when Jesus looks at Mary during the scourging, and a couple of flashback scenes with His Apostles, including a scene in which He looks straight out at us while telling Peter, "You will deny me three times."

In some respects The Passion is a very Catholic movie. Many Protestants have responded favorably to the movie, which is great, but the spirit of the movie itself is clearly intended to be Catholic. This is so not because the movie says things that Catholic believe and Protestants do not, but because the perspectives and the emphases of the movie are more typical of a Catholic approach. The whole focus on the completely human physicality of actions in the life of Jesus is something that is more commonly heard among Catholics than among Protestants. The constant inclusion and importance of Mary in the events is obviously something which will seem more natural to Catholics. The emphasis on Jesus as Jewish, and specifically the Jewish Messiah (Christ), which starts even with the title of the movie The Passion of the Christ, fits more into the Catholic tradition than the Protestant one, because the Catholic Church is completely in tune with the idea of the Church as a real Kingdom, and Jesus as the King. Most importantly, while the Catholic teaching on the Real Presence in the Eucharist is not explicitly presented, the institution of the Eucharist at the Last Supper is strongly emphasized and connected to the actual body of Jesus on the cross, and there is an earlier reference during the Jewish trial of Jesus to His controversial teaching in John 6, a verse that is decidedly more emphasized in Catholic circles ("Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me and I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me").

The most striking aspect of this movie is obviously the depiction of the bloody violence inflicted upon Jesus. Although I have seen roughly equivalent violence at moments in other movies, the sustained nature of the violence and gore in this movie might be almost unprecedented. It is difficult to watch, and clearly was intended to be difficult for the audience. Of course, this violence is not an end in itself, but has to be understood in a religious context to have meaning. By gaining more understanding of the physical suffering inflicted on Jesus, we have an opportunity to remind ourselves of the awesome wonder of the truth that God took on a human nature and underwent this unbearable torture for our sake. In short, the point of the whole movie is to give us some sense of the physical reality of the events that are represented by the crucifixes we see on our walls or in church.

Naturally, there are some things in the movie that I would have done differently. I understand that some extra-scriptural material has to be put into any movie like this. However, I found it odd that there was so much of it, especially since it appeared to me that not even all the usable scriptural material was included. A number of scenes, which I believe come from the account of the visions of Anne Katherine Emmerich, seemed to me to add little or nothing to the story: Jesus being pushed off a bridge on the way to be tried by the Jewish leaders, Pilate's wife giving Mary a cloth which Mary uses to wipe up the blood of Jesus after the scourging, and a crow coming down to peck at the eyes of the unrepentant criminal crucified next to Jesus. When I first started hearing about this movie that Mel Gibson was making, the thing that worried me the most was that he was said to be relying heavily on the records of the visions of Emmerich, and possibly on other visionaries as well. While it did not end up being a fatal flaw, I still think that this reliance on the account of these visions was a mistake, and not a minor one. The movie would have been better without it.

Also, when Gibson portrayed non-human phenomena, such as the crowd of clearly demonic "children" tormenting Judas, I felt the effect was sometimes overdramatized and unnecessary. It seems to me that the events could simply have been allowed to speak for themselves. We know that there were demonic forces at work during the Passion, and I'm not sure they needed to be materially portrayed as much as they were. I felt the same way about the point in the garden of Gethsemane when the snake came out from under Satan's robe and went to Jesus, and Jesus stepped on it. That might seem frightening, and of course there is a symbolism going back to Eden, and the prophecy of a savior crushing the snake with his heel, but how exactly did the event fit into the story of the Passion? I am assuming that we are not meant to think that the devil produced a snake just so that Jesus could fulfill that prophecy in an unnecessarily literal way. So what was the snake supposed to do to Jesus? Again it seemed like dramatizing evil merely for the sake of dramatizing evil, and I hardly think that is necessary in this story. The face of the "baby" that Satan appears to be carrying during the scourging is truly chilling, but again I was left wondering exactly what Gibson was trying to convey to the audience, and to me the effect again seemed overdone, a look more appropriate to a horror movie where the central object of the movie is fear. All that said, I thought the overall portrayal of Satan was appropriate. The actual choice made about how to portray Satan was also interesting. I had heard before the movie that a woman was cast as Satan, which was unusual, and frankly I had my doubts about how well that would work. However, while it is true that the person who plays the part of Satan is in fact a woman, the voice is that of a man, and in the movie Satan is really only depicted as weirdly androgynous. The effect is appropriately disturbing, and I would rather have seen Gibson leave the explicit representation of demonic forces at that, rather than introducing the other less subtle elements that I have mentioned.

Of course, the big criticism that some people have leveled at this movie is that it is supposedly anti-semitic, or could encourage anti-semitism. This criticism is largely based upon the idea that the movie disproportionately blames and vilifies the Jews as the murderers of Jesus. I do not think this criticism is justified, and I find the notion that this movie will make people anti-semitic simply absurd. To put it bluntly, if you come out of this movie anti-semitic, then you went into it anti-semitic. That said, I think I can see how the portrayal of the Jewish authorities and crowds in the movie might be disturbing to some Jews, but only if they are not familiar with the totality of the Gospel message. Judging anything outside of its context can cause problems. Certainly, the Jewish authorities are mostly seen as evil, without much nuance, and the Jewish crowds are by and large seen as easily manipulated by their leaders. This hardly makes them unique in the human race, of course. One can perhaps understand the position of Jews who feel that this aspect is emphasized too much in the movie, particularly to the extent that some of this emphasis is a result of the reliance on Emmerich in supplementing the Gospel material. However, some of the material to which Jews are objecting is straight from the Gospels. Here, obviously, Christians must insist upon the veracity of the Gospels, and I think that the criticism only sounds plausible anyway if the story of the Passion is taken in isolation from all of the rest of Scripture, which is not an acceptable way of reading the story. As was repeatedly pointed out before the opening of the film, the whole point of the Passion narrative is that we all share in the guilt for the suffering and death of Jesus, because He died to save us from our sins. The people of Israel, as the Chosen People, always stand in Scripture for all humanity, at both its best and worst. In Scripture, everything the Jewish people do, we all do. (Incidentally, while I will not discuss this further in order to avoid extending an already lengthy review, I think another reason why the Jewish people in the movie may appear to some viewers to be presented more negatively than is really the case in the movie is because in my view the movie in some ways presents the Roman role in these events more sympathetically than is warranted by the Gospels.)

Incidentally, one of the things in Scripture that is at least partially omitted in the movie is the line "His blood be upon us and upon our children," uttered by the Jewish leaders and crowd. The line is actually spoken in the movie in Aramaic, but it is not subtitled. While I obviously would have supported omitting any scenes from Emmerich that might have been considered potentially offensive to anyone, I think this line should have been fully included (as I think all usable material from the Gospels should have been included). Granted that this line has sometimes been dishonestly twisted for less than noble purposes in the past, I do not think we can best combat that by creating some sort of unjustifiable taboo on speaking the line at all. The antidote to a lie is not silence but the truth. Again, the Jews stand for everyone, and this line has always been meant to communicate a statement of guilt for all humanity. Furthermore, while this line has often been interpreted exclusively as a curse, from the perspective of a theology of the redemption, there is actually a blessing contained in the line, unintended by those who spoke it. In the end, the blood of Jesus had better be on you, or you are in trouble. The blood of the Passover lamb on the houses of the Israelites in Egypt marked them to be spared by God from the plague of death brought on the Egyptians, and the blood of Jesus, the true Passover Lamb, must be on us if we are to be saved from the real death of sin. We all bear the guilt for the blood of Jesus because of our sins, but it is also through the blood of Jesus that we are saved from our sins. We cannot simply wash our hands of the matter, as Pilate tried to do. We must accept responsibility for what we have done, so that we can fully embrace what Jesus has done for us. In a sense, I think that is what The Passion is all about as a movie: understanding what we have done in our sins, and far more importantly the enormity of what Jesus has done for us in His love and mercy. Jesus suffered and died for all sinners, but He will not force us to receive His salvation, and part of receiving it is accepting that we have sinned, that He died for us, and that we share the responsibility for His suffering and death. Only if we accept our guilt can our guilt be washed away. God help the man who does not join in saying "His blood be on us and our children." That person is truly cursed.

At the end of the day, of course, this is a movie, with flaws like any other movie. It is not a supernatural event. If you do not believe before you see the movie that Jesus is God, and that He suffered and died to save us from our sins, will you believe these things after you see the movie? Probably not. If you are Christian, will it make you stop sinning? Nope. As a Catholic, will this movie help you spiritually as much as going to Mass even once? No. Might it give you a further appreciation of the kind of suffering and death that Jesus endured for you, presenting a devastating artistic depiction of the reality of His suffering and death? Yes, I think so. This is a spectacular artistic and dramatic meditation on the Passion.