“You have heard it said you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. For if you love only those who love you, what reward is there in that?”

The Passion of the Christ tells the story of the last twelve hours of Jesus’ life. Beginning in the Garden of Olives, it immediately starts off with Jesus being arrested for his widely known miracles and for announcing that he is the Son of God. The rest of the film tells the rest of the story, ending in Jesus’ eventual crucifixion.

And as a Christian myself, it had definitely been about time that I had watched this movie. Overall, I have a few criticisms, which I’ll get into later, but for the most part, I thought it did a pretty excellent job at depicting these horrific events and things that happened to Jesus. I also thought that Jim Caviezel, the actor who portrays Jesus, did an absolutely incredible job, whether he is the same ethnicity as Jesus or not. He gave a very subtle but powerful performance, and one thing that really made this movie a hard watch was seeing the pain that he was suffering, while he still remained silent and continued to let the soldiers inflict horrible harm on him.

I also think that having a movie, as hard of a watch as it might be, depicting these events is extremely important because watching and actually seeing the graphic brutality of this story, and what I believe to have actually happened in real life, isn’t the same as reading it. To be honest, I don’t even think that I understood just how miserable Jesus was in those last twelve hours, not only physically, but mentally, because, like I just said, reading something and kind of having to just imagine it in your head, even if it is pretty much the same, doesn’t hit as hard as seeing it in a movie. And no, this is not an advocacy for saying that the movie is always better than the book, and I’m obviously not going to go to this movie instead of any of the four Gospels, I’m just saying that I think The Passion of the Christ most excels at showing you just how horrible the last twelve hours of Jesus’ life before he was crucified were.

There were also a lot of additions to the story that obviously kind of had to be added, or else the movie would be like thirty minutes long. I think that pretty much all of them served the story well, as creepy and kind of weird as the ones with satan, in particular, could be. They all served the story and added a dramatic effect that helped make this more than just a two-hour torture movie, particularly in the second half.

I have to be honest, though, as a Christian, I think that it is always important that Christian-based movies or movies that are putting Biblical stories to film should always be accessible to people who aren’t Christians, and I did not find this movie to be one of those hardly at all. It sort of starts off at a random moment, just kind of throwing you into the story, and for me, I knew what was happening because I have read this story so many times, but for someone else who has not, I couldn’t see them being anything other than confused. The movie, while it does show how great Jesus was, mainly through flashbacks, doesn’t really explain or deepen him as a character, other than the people who want him killed, saying everything that he said he was.

Kind of adding onto that, I think the film tells way too small of a section of this story for a two-hour movie. It’s almost a bit of a Hobbit trilogy situation, where just a few pages from the story were taken out and made into a feature-length film. Funny enough, I would have much rather seen a three-hour-long version of this movie, maybe showing important events more in-depth, such as the Last Supper, instead of just in short bursts through the use of flashbacks. By starting off at such a random point without really introducing the audience to anything that is happening, I feel that the movie comes off more as a series of graphic events rather than an actual story with deeper storytelling.

The last criticism I have is kind of a weird and obscure one, but to be honest, I don’t think that any of the other performances, aside from Jim Caviezel and the guy who played Peter, were really all that impactful. One of the best ways that this film could have shown just how horribly Jesus was treated would be by showing the emotions that the people who were watching were going through, but really, for the most part, a lot of the people, including his mother, Mary, kind of gave off the feeling that they were just standing by and watching emotionless. This could be a me thing, but I can’t lie and say it didn’t bother me while I was watching the film.

For the most part, however, for a Christian who knows this story well, I think it did a really good job at showing these events. It just could have been better if it had shown more of the actual story.