This week we sat down to watch the 2016 film ‘Risen’. It was an interesting film to watch for a number of reasons.
Firstly I don’t watch many explicitly Christian films – despite my wife having a great many of them on DVD – since I am dyed-in-the-wool sceptic, but I found this one gave me a truly pleasant viewing experience.
This was partly because the acting and presentation of the film were excellent. Okay you might say the plot wasn’t exactly inventive, but then it was never going to be in a Christian film that sticks to the story.
Secondly I really appreciated the intellectual honesty of the film in that it portrayed the jewish people not as some wonderful utopian society (a-la the latest ‘Ben Hur’ remake and the god awful recent biopic of Moses), but rather as composed of dirty, fanatical religious zealots who had a nasty habit of murdering both each other as well as the Romans for any perceived slight or religious difference.
In fact the film makes it quite clear that the reason that zealots such as Barabbas are murdering Roman civilians and attacking Roman soldiers is because the Romans aren’t jewish and are therefore sub-human scum in the eyes of the jewish religious fanatics.
Thirdly the film also doesn’t try to shift blame for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ away from the jews and onto the Romans. It largely follows the Gospel accounts and the traditional Christian view of the event as the product of a conspiracy of the jewish religious authorities against Christ.
Hence why ‘Risen’ has been linked by Christian media to Mel Gibson’s 2004 blockbuster ‘The Passion of Christ’ (1) and why it succeeds as a film. It has a good cast and caters to its target audience rather than seeking to appease modern Pharisees in their claims that anything they don’t like it ‘hate speech’ and must be outlawed.
Factor in that ‘Risen’ was created and shot by an almost exclusively non-jewish cast and crew (2) and you get the reason for its power and quality as a cinematic production.
It is European Christian cinema for Christian Europeans.
References
(1) http://www.christianpost.com/news/risen-new-movie-about-jesus-resurrection-linked-to-mel-gibsons-massively-successful-and-gritty-passion-of-the-christ-139248/
(2) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3231054/