I’m guessing the original art came from their website. I didn’t get it from there though.
When Son of God hit the theaters last February, various people at my church were talking about it like it was the Second Coming of Christ. A Jesus movie! In the theaters! In wide release; not only playing in hard-to-find specialty theaters in Sacramento and San Francisco! Produced by Hollywood producers! (Well, Mark Burnett and Roma Downey, anyway; she got to play Jesus’s mom.) Public vindication of everything we Christians hold dear!
I got in some minor trouble at church ’cause I had made, in the church’s coming-announcements video, some joking comments about how jazzed Christians were about the movie. They didn’t appreciate it, and complained to the pastor. He asked me to refrain from the commentary, and just give the announcements. So if you attend my church, and have always wondered why I stopped making comments and jokes in the announcement video, that’s why: We got complaints from the humor-deprived, and we decided it was easier and better to not offend them, then entertain.
This week I decided to kill two hours, 18 minutes (well, less; I skipped the credits) by watching Son of God on Netflix. So now I’m gonna rant about it.
I am not one of those Christians who’s just thrilled to pieces every time someone decides to pander to my demographic. If you’re gonna write Christian novels, create Christian pop music, produce Christian movies, and otherwise manufacture things which are meant to entertain me, I expect them to be at the same level of quality—ideally better—than the stuff pagans produce. If Christians are, as we claim, doing this stuff for the Lord, we owe him no less than the best-crafted stuff in the cosmos. You know, like the Renaissance artists were cranking out.
But that ain’t the case. Christians produce crap. To be fair, some of us have no taste, and the reason they produce lousy Christian entertainment is because, though they genuinely want viable Christian alternatives for the pagan stuff, they lack the ability to produce good Christian alternatives. It’s like Cecilia Jimenez, the Spanish woman who wanted to “fix” a fresco of Jesus’s face, and wound up ruining the art. The best of intentions, but no talent. And many such people who work in Christian entertainment really shouldn’t, but they’re as dense about their deficiencies as the folks who tragicomically try out for American Idol.
The rest—who deliberately produce rubbish, figuring Christians are happy to get anything, and will forgive them their limitations—have no such excuse.
You can see where I’m going. Son of God falls into that same vat of melodramatic mediocrity which we find in so much Christian entertainment. The only reason it got anywhere was Burnett and Downey—he, an extremely successful producer of reality television, with limited experience on a scripted series; she, an actress mostly known for Touched By an Angel, which isn’t a bad show, but she didn’t write it. They had enough pull in the business to get the History channel miniseries The Bible on the air, and Son of God is a spinoff.
First I heard of The Bible, I thought it was a documentary. It was on the History channel after all—though if you know anything about that network, their definition of “documentary” and “history” and “fact” is looser than my stool on a Daniel fast. So I didn’t assume it’d be a good documentary; it’d be kinda like one of Burnett’s reality shows, where they artificially ramp up the drama with clever editing and music. Turns out it was a miniseries. And a really cheesy miniseries: Overacting, unnecessary special effects, a lot of liberties taken with the biblical text—which is forgivable if it makes the story more interesting, but it didn’t. After I watched the first episode, featuring Abraham, I decided that was plenty.
Son of God was more of the same: A melodramatic portrayal of Jesus’s life, focusing on Jesus starting his ministry to “change the world.” But it never explained how he changed it. Movie-Jesus spoke very little about God’s kingdom. We get to live forever, it seems; but nothing about how or why or what it’s like. Or what we do now: After Movie-Jesus ascends into heaven, Movie-Peter gets up and says, “Well, let’s get to work,” but to work doing what? Founding Christianity? Building churches? Making converts? Was that even Jesus’s idea in the first place?
I read some mommy blogger’s review of the movie. Her kids were a little surprised she’d let ’em see a PG-13 movie (rated that way ’cause whipping and crucifixion, of course) but she figured, as so many of us do, “Well, that did happen,” so off they went. She liked it.
But she had some concerns. Mostly they had to do with how biblically accurate it wasn’t. Movie-Jesus said many things Real Jesus said, but not always in the proper context. She missed some of her favorite teachings and miracles and stories. She was annoyed by the bits they just plain got wrong. Mary Magdalene appeared to be one of the Twelve—and while she was around a lot, it’s doubtful she went everywhere with Jesus. Judas Iscariot was toned down a lot—he’s not a traitor who ratted out Jesus to the Judean Senate, but someone who was trying to start a dialogue between the two, and killed himself in despair when things went downhill.
Those kinds of things used to bug me too… till I realized these are only movies. Not documentaries. For budgetary and dramatic reasons, stuff’s gonna fall by the wayside. And because the movie-makers are seldom bible scholars, they’re gonna be clueless that they dropped such details. Or they just won’t care—like George Stevens didn’t care how little Max von Sydow resembled a first-century Palestinian Jew, or how little the American southwest resembled Palestine, in The Greatest Story Ever Told.
Still, what tends to bug me about Jesus movies is how much time all of them (except the word-for-word movies) spend padding the stories of Herod, Pilate, and Caiaphas. They want it made crystal clear that these are the bad guys, and they’re bad. Boo at them! Cheer for Jesus and the apostles. But in the filmmakers’ quest to make the folks who killed Jesus look more and more sinister, they skip over a wealth of Jesus’s valuable teachings and miracles. Fr’instance, Son of God has no exorcisms. No temptation in the desert; no Satan making an extrabiblical (but probably accurate) appearance in Gethsemane. Movie-Jesus is never shown defeating evil. Even though Real Jesus came to destroy the devil’s works.
And the other thing that bugs me—but not just about Jesus movies; really it’s every movie set in the past—is how everybody is obligated to speak with a British accent. Even when they’re American productions, and the cast is full of Americans. After I saw how The Nativity Story decided to go with Israeli accents, I’ve been ruined for all future Jesus movies: If they’ve gotta do a fake accent, at least make ’em do an appropriate fake accent.
But nothing bugs me like a lame script and overacting. And there’s lots of that in Son of God. I’ve seen the Jesus story performed by good actors—The Gospel of John went with Royal Shakespeare Company-caliber actors instead of overactors, and was excellent. There are good screenwriters and actors out there who can write and give realistic, thoughtful portrayals of the folks in the bible. Burnett and Downey didn’t hire ’em. They went with big, showy, flashy, dramatic—they even hired Hans Zimmer to do the music, which I realized as soon as I noticed one particular bit of it sounded an awful lot like Batman Begins.
So there’s my review: There are way better Jesus movies out there. Watch one of them. Gospel of John is my current favorite; go with that one.