What does a biblical blockbuster look like in the twenty-first century?
Hollywood has wrestled with the question of how best to resurrect old genres. The past couple of years have seen a resurgence in revisionist westerns like The Hateful Eight or Bone Tomahawk or The Revenant. There have even been a smaller number of contemporary swords-and-sandals epics like The Eagle or Centurion or Pompeii. These genre were once a staple of Hollywood production, but they fell by the wayside in the intervening years. Barring an occasional breakout success, they are considered dead genres.
Chariots of fire!
Biblical epics are very much an example of such a genre, to the point that Hail, Caesar! focused on the production of such a film as a celebration of the Golden Age of Hollywood. More people can probably point to the iconic version of Ben-Hur starring Charleton Heston as the eponymous chariot rider than can name Lew Wallace as the author of the book upon which it was based. When Hollywood attempted a blockbuster adaptation of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books, they did so by stripping out a lot of the more overt Christian themes.
Ben-Hur is part of a mini modern revival of these classic biblical epics for a new age, alongside films like Exodus: Gods and Kings or Noah or Risen. It is a film which struggles with the question of what a biblical epic needs to look like in this day and age, but is primarily useful as a counter-example. Whatever a successful modern biblical epic might look like, it is not this.
“Is Game of Thrones hiring, by any chance?”
Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: ben-hur, film, Movie, non-review review, review | 6 Comments »
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