"It is as it was." -The Pope John Paul II describing "The Passion of the Christ."
The camera shakily comes down from the white moon and dark blue sky to show a beautiful set of a garden. Jesus of Nazareth kneels in the garden and talks to his father, which is God. We read the subtitles of which tells us what he is saying. Jesus kneels before God and as he sits back upon his knees, we see Satan, a woman sitting near him. Her snake-like neck movements give her great character. She is so mysterious. She tells Jesus "No, no no no..." and that he is not the Son of Man.
The camera goes down to her legs and in between them, from under her robes, comes out a snake. It slithers over to Jesus, and he stands on his feet. The snake moves slow, but doesn't move after a sudden stomp of Jesus' foot.
My least favorite character comes on screen now. He is asking a jew where Jesus is. He gives away Jesus' place for some silver. My least favorite character was dressed like I was in "Robin Hood." I dislike him because he seems harmless in the beginning and in the end, he is just to hateful towards Jesus.
The movie began with a quote about how Jesus died for our sins. That's a great way to begin a movie, I think. The music was vocals by a foreign woman which sounded a lot like "Black Hawk Down." I thought the music was alright, it was necessary in some parts.
The men commanded by the man I am calling my least favorite character set out to find Jesus. When they get to the garden, Peter is with Jesus. This scene gave a great feel of Mel Gibson's directing. There was slow motion without any other sound, and there was really shaky slow motion. Shaky slow motion looks like the movies in the 70s, I dislike how it looks, but it is a Mel Gibson thing, I believe. The movie did have a similar feel to Braveheart. The badguys were really bad, and the good people were shown as good.
The slow motion beginning of when Jesus is arrested really did feel like a Mel Gibson movie. I'm not sure you would agree. While Peter fights off the guards, Jesus stands still. One of the guards is hit in the head and his ear bleeds. Jesus touches him and he is healed. This fight seemed like a normal fight from an action movie. This guard, who was healed by Jesus, doesn't move, because he knows Jesus is being arrested.
Jesus is tied up and taken to a temple. On the way, the guards beat him. Jesus, played by Jim Caviesel, has a swelled eye throughout the whole movie because of these beatings. I never saw him hit in the eye, so it felt weird to me.
He stands before my least favorite character now. In a large crowd full of hatred, he sees his mother, Mary. He thinks about his mother, and in a flashback it shows Jesus as a carpenter. He makes a wooden table. His mother asks "Who is that for?"
"For a rich man," says Jesus. Then he is invited in for dinner and his mother washes his hands. This scene had a great feel to it, but we know, sadly, that it is only a flashback. We see Jesus with his swollen eye standing in front of the man who looks like an evil pope, my least favorite character.
This man asks why Jesus should be condemned. Why? I never found out. He is a Jew, and forwards his beliefs to others. He believes he is the son of God.
For some reason, this scene puts much hatred into the evil pope. He takes Jesus to Pilitas (How...to...spell?) and tries to have him get rid of Jesus and have his beliefs stopped. The crowd cheers that Jesus should die. Pilitas sees nothing wrong with him, and that he is innocent, and harmless. So he sends him elsewhere. The next person to see Jesus just thinks he is crazy. "He's no son of Man."
So he lets him free. Jesus is taken back to Pilatas. This is the day he decides to let one of his prisoners go, to free Jesus. He asks the crowd "Who shall go?"
The other man who would have been set free was a murderer, and yet, still, the crowd wants Jesus to be crucified. Pilatas says to the evil pope "He won't go without punishment, but I will set him free."
So here we go, this is the scene where Jesus is whipped. It seems so early in the film.
Jesus is handcuffed to a rock. The men behind him take out bamboo sticks, or some kind of sticks, and swat him. The first hit leaves a mark, a red mark, but doesn't cut. It actually did look pretty real, I was amazed. Over and over, they hit him. His back then had red marks all over and yet, still, Jesus stood before the crowd.
The guards who were hitting Jesus were terrible. They were laughing at him and they loved punishing him. They made fun out of hitting him. Single shots of the two guards hitting him gave me a sick feeling. They were laughing so hard that it was sick. When Jesus stood before the crowd, they were amazed.
Now, they needed another whip. They first took out a stick with spikes at the end, but these weapons were rejected. This reminded me of Braveheart and how the weapons used during the torture scene in the end were shown. Remember in Braveheart how the midgets showed the audience what was going to happen to William Wallace? Well, the guards in this movie showed the audience was the whip was like by hitting the table.
Let me describe the whip they used. It was a stick with many whips coming out of it. At the end of smaller whips, there were arrows, metal arrows. When the whip was hit to the table, the arrows stuck in the wood. These were going to cut up Jesus' back.
The first crack was on Jesus' back and it made about five cuts. Throughout this scene, I could hear a woman in the back row putting her teeth together and breating in very deeply.
The most severe hits were when they arrows got stuck in Jesus' skin, and the guards fiercly ripped them out of his back using the wooden end of the whip. Over and over they whipped him. Then started a slow motion scene of Jesus' mother in the crowd crying for him. Then Satan was watching this, moving through the crowd like she was on wheels.
The next shot of Jesus showed only his hands because he was being blocked by the stone. The men behind him were still hitting him. I was wondering how many times he had to be hit. The man counting the hits just kept going on and on. Mary cried with her daughter (?) throughout this scene.
The only part that bothered me in the whole movie was when the guards whipped Jesus and accidentally hit him in the head. The metal arrows whipped around and hit Jesus in the eye.
Shots of Jesus' body were very bloody. His skin cut up all over. The main guard told the two to stop. One of Jesus' handcuffs were taken off. Jesus' bloody back hit the ground while his other hand was still cuffed to the rock. Then the guards started whipping his stomach. This scene forced me to imagine the burning of each whip. Each cut was deep, this was very graphic and it looked real. I was really amazed by how well it looked. Think about it this way, each time Jesus was whipped, it looked like a bear had clawed at his back.
He was hit so many times that his skin looked terrible. One of Pilatas' guards came in and screamed "NO, you're not supposed to kill him, only punish him."
They were trying to whip him to death. So now Jesus was uncuffed and had to stand before the large crowd again, this time, all cut up, and cut up all over his body.
Mary and her Daughter and Peter took cloths to go clean up the blood of where Jesus was whipped. Puddles of blood were surrounding one side of the rock with the handcuffs. The daughter thought about a time when Jesus had helped her. This was another flashback. Jim Caviesal now looked very different because he was clean. His hands held dirt from the ground and pulled across the screen, which was actually director Mel Gibson's hand. Then the daughter came crawling up and SHE had been bloodied up. I didn't understand what this was all about, I should have asked my dad. He understood everything that was happening. This was a flashback, you must remember.
When the flashback of Jesus helping his sister (?) stand ended, the next scene showed Jesus standing before the large crowd. Jesus having a sister seems odd to me, I don't really understand right now who that could of been, but she was played by Monica Belucci. She's a great actress.
Jesus stood before the crowd, but still, the crowd ordered him to be crucified. Pilatas couldn't turn them down. This scene seemed like he was doing it so the crowd wouldn't hate him. He spoke to Jesus, who said "You will do what you are meant to do."
So Jesus was put in a room to be teased by the guards before he was crucified. The guards laughed and made fun of him about how he was "The king of people" and thought he was so powerful. They made him a crown and a cape to make him look like a king. The cape touched his deeply cut wounds and his crown was from a rosebush. The spikes of the rose bush were punctured into his head, making him bleed down his face. He wore this the rest of the movie.
Now he had to carry his cross up a hill, through a town where all people who loved him lived. The town cried for him. Jesus, not being human of course, had the strength to carry this huge and heavy cross up the hill. This was actually most of the movie. Jesus carried the cross up the hill and this scene lasted forever. He kept falling down to.
This scene wasn't as bad as I thought it was at the time. I mean, people fall down. Its a metaphor for life's problems. People fall down, but they can always get back up on their feet. A man who lived in the town was yelled at by the guards and forced to help Jesus carry the cross. This symbolized that all people need help. All people are helped through life and all people need help. Jesus and this man made eye contact and the man then wanted to help Jesus carry his cross. This scene took about half an hour.
When Jesus fell for the first time, his mother screamed and ran towards him. The scene interlaced with a flashback of Jesus as a child. The mother ran over to the baby Jesus and the grown, bloodied Jesus. The child Jesus smiled and felt better after just falling down. The grown Jesus tried to smile, I'm sure, and touched her cheek with his hand. I think this scene should have been a lot more emotional than it was.
When they got up to the top of the hill, Jesus crawled onto his cross on his knees and layed down on it. One hand was taken from him. This is another scene that showed Mel Gibson's hand, which put the nail down onto Jesus' palm.
How they did this scene was showed on Entertainment Tonight. Jim Caviesal's arm was held out and a fake palm was made. The palm looked very real, I heard. Then another man's fingers were the ones used as Jesus' fingers. Two men, including Jim Caviesal, were used to make the effect of the nail going into Jesus' palm. Jesus screamed, which was great acting by Jim, and blood squirted out from the hand.
For the next hand that needed to be nailed, it wouldn't stretch out to where the nail was supposed to go in. So the guard to the hand and said "Let me show you how to do it," and stretched Jesus' body out, which made a good sound effect of bones cracking and Jesus screaming. And the second hand was nailed on.
Now they went down his body to his feet. Another piece of wood was added for Jesus to lay his feet on, and the nail was hit down by a sledgehammer. Each time it hit, we could hear bones breaking in Jesus' feet. This scene could have been painful to most people, but I am different. I was expecting it. I specifically listened for bones cracking.
The cross was flipped over a couple of times so the guards could secure the nails from behind so he wouldn't come down. The cross flipping over seemed really violent and painful. The cross was put into a hole so that Jesus would hang on the cross.
Three days, Jesus stayed up there. This scene lasted another half an hour of Jesus' Mother crying and wishing to die with him. The winds picked up and Jesus finally died on the cross, with his head falling down to the right, like we see on crucifixes in churches.
The winds really picked up now and the temple of which the evil pope had first seen Jesus in was broken in half. The building made of stones broke in half and the evil pope, my least favorite character, started crying. He wanted to take Jesus down from the cross to see if he would get better. On the cross, it seemed that Jesus was losing his faith in the Lord, God. But after he had died was when the magic started.
The storm started with a raindrop falling from the sky, and the raindrop appeared to fall from the camera. I can't explain that special effect any better than that.
Jesus was taken down from the cross and put into his mother's arms. She held her son's body closely, and cried for him. The screen then blacked out.
The epilogue, my favorite scene, was of Jesus' body in a white bag. The bag became empty, Jesus was sitting next to where his body was. The camera had followed the shadows from inside a cave, the burial for Jesus' body. But there sat Jim Caviesal, alive, and unharmed. He stood up, naked, and walked past the camera, showing a hole in his right hand, where the nail had been.
And that ended "The Passion of the Christ."
It was a very graphic, but pretty accurately good. It was well made. The directing style was definitely newer, and Mel Gibson did a great job. I went into the movie, jealous that I wasn't a part of the great project of recreating Jesus' death. The movie was well made, but I can't imagine anyone wanting to watch it again. It is great to watch the first time. It was entertaining, and my excitement going into the theater was very great. I give the movie 7 out of 10 stars because of the story. The walk through the town took forever, and the whipping scene seemed to go on long. Mel Gibson is definitely a pain freak, he was tortured in Payback, Braveheart, Lethal Weapon, and there was a nasty scene in Conspiracy Theory. That's just how he is. He wanted audiences to be disgusted by those scenes. I didn't feel really sick or disgusted. I thought the movie was entertaining. I would want to see it again, but that would be it. I didn't get a great religious feel to it. I don't think it was that controversial, I don't think it was that big of a deal. The music wasn't that great, but it was good. The film and torture scenes was much less than what I expected. There's my complaints. Mel Gibson did a great job, but I still consider him a learning man. He's directed three movies, "Man Without a Face," "Braveheart," and this. I think he should direct more movies. He's a great guy, I like him, and I have a lot of respect for him.
7 out of 10 stars is what I give the film "The Passion of the Christ." It is definitely rated R, and I don't think anybody under 13 should be seeing this movie. And if you are older than that, you should understand what you like to see in movies, and what you can handle.
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