Manny-54

People who are not interested in the subject of love should not spend their time watching this movie. If you have felt the pain of unreturned love. If you have felt the sorrow of loss. If you found you can love two people, each in a different way. If you went through love as an illness. If you find the path to ourselves can be found in nature. If you are interested in all these topics, and you actually have a "heart", then you will not be annoyed by the > two hours of this movie. If not, I think this movie was not shot for you. (I saw many teenagers react very unfavorably to this movie. If you expect a Disney love story forget about it. This is about deep feelings.)

It wasn't until I saw this movie for perhaps the third or fourth time that it finally dawned on me what the point of it all was. The sub title of the novel gives us a clue "A tale of the Christ". And until I became a Christian myself, the sheer magnitude and grandiosity of the production overshadowed this most important aspect: healing and forgiveness (which only Christ can give) in a time of paganism and worldliness embodied by the Roman overlords.

Judah Ben-Hur goes on a tortuous, harrowing, life draining, gut wrenching journey of Roman barbarism thirsting for revenge. Put on a Roman galley to die by his boyhood friend, only his hate keeps him alive.

When they meet for the last time at the end of the chariot race, Judah, having been touched twice by the healing hand of the carpenter, Jesus (whose face you never see), can already sense no feeling of accomplishment by the victory over a dying Messalah (he should have won an Oscar for the death scene alone).

The culmination of the physical healing of his once leprous mother and sister (emblematic in the flow of blood from the cross into a stream of water) is one of the most moving in cinematic history. Their faith has made them whole and Judah's new-found faith has liberated him from the hate that had kept him captive.

This is no Batman, Spiderman, Sin City, Power Ranges, X-Men... this film's comic book-like effect is achieved by the inverted strategy of incorporating all the elements of a live-action into the codes of a typical comic book. Totally unprecedented mix of stylism!

What's the most fascinating that this film is using extremely subversive methods challenging the constraints of the movie (or genre) language and also our own reality by creating an artificiality in a futuristic multi-cultural highly advanced purely philosophical dimension that somehow represents the world of our wildest imagination, subconscious desires and illogical dreams, and de-facto reflecting our modern social thinking and time of the globalization... especially of the Asian and American cinema, the film is wittingly dealing with the mix of American (Californium, Iridium) and Asian (all the victims of this transformation) sensibilities and letting their main characters fighting for their own identity and searching for their own cultural roots. From this perspective the film is a pure philosophy encapsulated in a visual form contemplating the materialistic world we might be coming closer every day by our impulse for escaping from the reality... now be it the materialism in terms of the video games, computers, films or any other fascinations with the unknown that have no basis in the reality...

Why i used to call this an "unprecedented masterpiece"? Well, probably because this film clearly and perfectly meets all the criteria it has brought on itself (see above). This film practically reaches to such distant borders very few average moviegoers could even catch on to. To them the credit of a "masterpiece" is still just related to the sort of artistic "pretentiousness" (if you know what i mean) but in my mind this word's meaning is not as limited when considering the infinite possibilities of the film language.