Passion of the Christ

The Passion of the Christ is one of many films about the life of Jesus but this particular one is different to the others. Released in 2004, directed by Mel Gibson and filmed in the ancient Aramaic language, `The Passion' focuses mainly on the death of Christ and shows us the full extent as to what he suffered to save mankind.

Before seeing The Passion of the Christ I hadn't heard much about it except that it was very violent and politically incorrect. In fact I hadn't seen or heard a review that said if it was good or bad or if it was well acted or if it was worth the watch. Everyone just seemed to be interested in saying that it is too violent, the movie should not have been made and Mel Gibson shouldn't be making money from a story about Jesus. (It made $212m in its second weekend in the US)

In my opinion it's better to see a film without hearing too much about it beforehand. With The Passion I was expecting to be bored for the first hour while seeing Christ preaching to his followers and healing the sick but Gibson didn't tire us all with that, he filmed it in an interesting way which pleasantly surprised me. In fact I was very impressed with the opening scenes. Instead of showing us Jesus' life from birth to death Gibson set the film at the last two days of his life while having the odd flashback to Jesus' earlier days.

The movie started with a night-time scene where we saw a hysterical Jesus afraid for his life roaming around in the woods. His apostles couldn't understand what was wrong with him. A figure of Satan was tempting Jesus not to go through with it while at the same time an army of Roman Soldiers was marching towards the woods to capture him.

The film was filled with suspense from start t...

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... didn't make any direct reference to Mary actually being the birth mother of Christ; they simply said that she was his mother, which I thought was clever, as some religions don't believe in the Immaculate Conception.

What I particularly liked was the fact that Gibson didn't Americanize the movie. It wasn't advertised with big clichéd lines like "This Winter Experience The Passion." It wasn't made in a Hollywood studio and filmed in English. Gibson set out to make it as believable and realistic as possible so he made it in Aramaic and this way everyone in the world can see it and experience it in the same way.

In my opinion it is about time that someone made a decent film about Christ and showed how brutally tragic his death actually was. Gibson's goal was simply to tell us how it was while entertaining us at the same time. He succeeded immensely.