Director: Kevin Reynolds
Score: 6/10
The Rising Tide: Revival In Cinema
“I think Christian is a wonderful noun, but a terrible adjective.”
- Lecrae, in an interview with the Miami New Times
I’ve had a rather strong love-hate relationship with religious cinema. Once upon a time, a Biblical epic was a sure-fire hit for a studio, back when Charleton Heston ruled the screen and you could cast 10,000 extras into your film. The religious movie boom seemed to coincide with the revivals that swept and defined the Bible Belt, but aside from that small window, the religious film genre has been a seemingly bottomless black hole of poor efforts, hack acting, and generally laughable passes at “films”.
The thing is, though, there’s been a resurgence of late. Beginning (arguably) with The Passion of the Christ, there’s been a groundswell effort to breathe life back into the genre. The various films have had wildly varying effectiveness, from oppressively heavy-handed to thrilling, but overall filmmakers have been pouring time, effort, and (more importantly) budgets into their work. Most of all, though, the recent successes (from the Bible movie and TV series to this very film) have attempted to step back and evaluate why their subject matter—well, matters.
I chose to lead off this review with the above quote because I truly believe it, and it sums up my idea of the religious cinema genre far more poetically than I ever have on my own. When you go into making a film from the stance that you’re trying to fulfill a certain ideological mandate, it’s almost impossible to keep from making a billboard instead of a movie. I’ve said for many years that I wish that people could give up on trying to make better Christian art and just try to make better art. To my utter shock, it actually appears to be happening.
Having gotten my rant out of the way, I’ll say that Risen is a quite well-made film. It follows the story of the resurrection of Christ from the position of a skeptic rather than a devotee, and is actually both well-acted and surprisingly accurate to the source material. Clavius (Joseph Fiennes) is a Roman tribune tasked with uncovering the conspiracy of the fake re-animation of Yeshua (Jesus, in the original Hebrew), and ends up uncovering that it wasn’t actually faked (I’d call spoiler warning, but it’s been spoiled for almost 2000 years now). His fictionalized account follows the days between Christ’s rising and his ascension, and to be fair, nothing in the Bible says this story couldn’t have happened. At the very least, it gives us the chance to see the varied and stunningly gorgeous landscape that this film displays.
The reason this film stands out and above the rest in my mind is that it not only handles a skeptic’s transformation with aplomb, but it also shows a character who isn’t overwhelmed with passionate zealotry. It’s so hard to show something as genuine as faith without giving in to some sort of mysticism, but Clavius’ portrayal is one of a staunchy logical man who has to reconcile impossible things he’s seen with what he’s always known to be true. It’s a character portrayal that resonates with me much more than one who just feels something so deeply that they can’t explain it. In my mind, true faith isn’t just some sort of blind leap into something that can’t be known; it’s the bridge that lets you move between knowing something and doing something about it. In the end, I saw that in Clavius’ character.
I doubt that Risen will stand the test of time the way The Ten Commandments did, but it shows a highly encouraging trend in the way faith is portrayed in cinema. The directing is a bit over-the-top at times, and there is the odd hammy moment, but I’d like to see more from this studio.
Acting: 7
Story: 6
Visuals: 8
Sound: 5
Enjoyment: 6
Overall Score: 6/10
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