The Book of Mormon Movie, Volume 1: The Journey

OK, first off I'd like to say that this movie and these forums are obviously always going to warrant Mormon bashing. "You don't hold the truth", "Yes we do", "No you don't", "Yes we do", and so on. To all you who are using this forum as a chance to express how wrong Mormon's are, please do it somewhere else, this is for movie reviews. Oh, and secondly, before you ever say if Mormon's are wrong, please go read the Book of Mormon FIRST and pray about it and THEN come say what you have to say. No one can tell you what's right, you have to find it out for yourself by personal witness.

OK, my intent was SO not to go ahead and attempt to respond to the "Mormon bashing". Holding that aside, and moving onto the movie....

It seems to me that as far as the movie goes there are basically two types of people. There are those who watch the movie looking for the spiritual message involved. To those people, I applaud you. You are the type who can go to church and most likely have your attitude changed that you may be able to leave church uplifted no matter who the speaker is. You do not judge that the speaker is a bad speaker, but rather you pay attention to what they are trying to say, and listen with the spirit on the same subject.

The second people are those who are bothered by the acting, and find it hard to get into the realism that this movie is trying to present and one of the purposes it is said to attempt. To these people, I am one of you, and wish I was the first.

I tried watching the first part of the movie with the attitude of the first type of people who watch this movie. Tried to look at the spiritual message, and the impact of such. I try to do that every time I watch a church movie (some of those older ones sure do have some pretty bad acting).

But I've been in drama, theater, etc, and I find myself wondering, "Couldn't this guy have done better??" I mean seriously, I've been in 8th grade musicals and plays where the acting was better. And it's not so much the actors fault, it's the director's. He very easily have found talented actors who had only ever been in plays to do many of these parts who we look up to.

As one said, Lehi seems to be made out to be a "pansy". I always read the Book of Mormon with Lehi being a prophet like what we have today, but who is concerned for his family's welfare. He is a father and a prophet, not a whiner.

I'm not going to pick apart each actor, and I have to admit I have not yet watched the whole movie either. I've been trying to get back in the spiritual mode and watch it again to see if I can get something more out of it.

I truly hope that if these guys are going to produce more volumes though, that they try to do better directing or script writing. Legacy was a church produced movie, and it had GREAT acting I thought, as WELL as a good spiritual feeling. Same with some of the other movies that have been done by the church.

I'll give this one another shot perhaps on a Sunday when I'm feeling a bit more uplifted and in tune. I was really hoping this could have been what I would have imagined it to have been. I sure do hope Work and the Glory doesn't get botched.

Again, to those who have thought this movie was great I applaud you. I'm trying to get to that point.

A note, I am an active Latter-day Saint.

First the bad...

I doubt Jews in Jeresalem in 600 BC looked like Anglo-saxons. Please find people that at least look Jewish to play the parts of Jews.

The make-up; a white woman with brown make-up to make her look Aboriginal or Jewish still looks like a white woman with make-up.

This movie was low-budget, and it looked like it. Everything seemed artificial; costumes, sets, minatures, it felt cheap. It didn't seem aged are blended in.

Lehi preaching, it seems the only thing he says is "The City will be destroyed, don't you understand" over and over. Couldn't think of any other dialogue?

Where were the master or establishing shots? There were very few, they would have helped the movie feel more complete.

The language seems inconsitant, sometimes it's modern, sometimes it's King James English. Pick one and stick to it.

This movie came off as low-rent, this is especially noted when Nephi is struggling to get free from his binds and the audience is laughing, rather than sympathising. This is becasue some parts of the movie are cheesy and that results in the audience not taking it seriously.

Cheesy parts #1... the brothers getting shocked, should have just left that out. Makes it seems like Nephi has magic powers, comes off weak.

Cheesy parts #2... Lehi's fake beard, it changes once from long straight and grey to short curly white.

Cheesy Parts #3... The aging of the characters wasn't belivable.

Cheesy Parts #4... the voice of God depicted with a deep voice and allot of reverb, cliché. Find a new way to do this. How about a soft whisper?

Cheesy Parts #5... Lemuals re-action to the angel, supposed to be a serious moment but is laughable because of his reaction.

Cheesy Parts $5... The Lamanites at the end dancing around a fire with war paint. Comes off over the top.

Now the good...

The acting was good 95% of the time, Laman was the best acted in this film.

Laban being murdered, I really like how this was done (other than the clichéd treatment of the voice of God) and it had good emotion.

Nephi's vision of being shown was is to come, again good emotion, and good editing.

Montage while Nephi is bound, well done.

We get a good sense of the conflict between Nephi and Laman.

I thought that the added dialogue (stuff not from scriptures) was good and blended scenes well. I enjoyed the added homour and seeing Nephi and his brothers bond after having conflicts.

The Joseph Smith stuff I thought was well done, except Moroni's visit, just seemed out of place the way it was done.

Final word. Before the next one, take the time to secure more money and make it the way it should be, a grand epic. Pretty good job for a first time director and allot of first time actors. I wouldn't see this one again but I would see the next installment.

This project is something that many members of the LDS faith have wanted to see in motion picture form. Gary Rogers had the guts to step up and actually do it. Was this a good idea? Should a 'golden book' be made into a movie with a 'copper budget?'

Well it was done. The result is something extremely controversial. The Book of Mormon Movie, Volume 1 the Journey has pros and cons. What is good about the movie is Noah Danby (Nephi). That man can act! He can cry on the queue and make a stunt move that looks painful. Mark Gollaher (Lemuel) isn't so bad either! The rest of the cast have their moments but are weak or sappy most of the time.

The miniatures by Clark Shaffer, who has work for I.L.M. for years, are well done. The models are large (the great and spacious building was about 5 five feet tall!) and highly detailed. The shots with Jerusalem and the boat are forced perspective shots (bringing the model close to the camera, then the people further away, and using a special lens to focus it correctly). And some of them worked while others did not. The compositing was done well most of the time, with the exception of a close up of Nephi and the blurred figures in the background have a sharp edge against the ocean.

The music is good at parts but needed to conform to a Middle East feel rather than the Russian feel I believe it had. This could be done by being in a different key and using different instruments.

My favorite scene was when Nephi collapses in the desert and there is a rush of images and powerful sound in a 'Gladiator' type of moment. It catches the film up to that point in an interesting well done editing moment.

The biggest problems were:

Too much voice over!!! The reason that some people feel that the movie is 'slow paced' is not because it is slow paced at all. It actually covers a lot at the end with a fast pace. It drags, and the reason it drags is because Nephi narrates half the time while you see a slide-show of events.

The Automatic Dialog Replacement (ADR) did not match up. In other words you can tell when it was dubbed. And the sound quality was poor. This project was done on 24p High Definition cameras, the same cameras Lucas used for Episode 2, and the print job to 35mm film was not good. It lacked a full range of values and color. It was grainy at parts and doesn't look as clean as the HD source.

Some of the things important to the story were skipped; how did Nephi convince Ishmael and his family to leave into the wilderness? How did the boat get to sea and how did they land?

The costumes where lacking in quality and for some reason there are more fat people in Jerusalem than actual middle-eastern people. Most of all the camera angles lacked in creativity and greatness (I admit that I did like a couple of shots and the helicopter shots were cool). There are a lot of jump cuts because of lack of any other angle to cut to, mostly a big lack of coverage. This is due to many factors including: a low budget, a limited 30 day production shoot, and an underpaid crew.

The worst scene was probably the one between Sariah and Ishmael's wife. It was over dramatic and the dialog is feeding back story information to the audience. That isn't the best way to establish their closeness.

What's amazing that the budget was stretched beyond it's limits and that this thing actually got through production and post production and into theaters, unlike Richard Dutcher's Joseph Smith project. After seeing this one I have faith that Gary will make the next one better. And don't think that you'll see a big budget 'Mormon Movie' not put out by the LDS church, if The Book of Mormon Movie was made for $40 million, or anything else considered big budget, it would never make the money back. It's just too small of an audience. The reason the LDS church can put out movies like 'The Testements' is because they can fund the production and the people working on it well.

Personally I am not a fan of these 'Mormon Movies.' But this is what a lot of people asked for so this is what they get.

I endured the Book of Mormon film at the Englewood last night. To paraphrase Mark Twain's assessment of the book as "choloroform in print," I'd rate this work as chloroform on celluloid.

Despite an opening title disclaimer from the LDS church, there were plenty of telltale embellishments of a Mormon production -- pretty, clean, crisp costumes, straight white teeth, Eurocentric looking actors, God as booming bass male voice, etc. I wasn't familiar with any of the actors, but movie lead Nephi was portrayed by a buff looking Greg Brady guy, an amalgam of Barry Williams and Lou Ferrigno. Laman was delightfully sinister. Lemuel had the voice of Chris Elliott which distracted me. Lehi was disgraceful and looked to be an understudy from the Olive Branch players. I was secretly relieved when the old patriarch died, but his deathbed scene was of predictable unpleasant duration.

Considerable Jerusalem intrigue as prelude to the Nephites blowing town, much not depicted in the opening of First Nephi, but I suppose it helped set the scene. Over an hour into the film and we'd yet to depart the book of First Nephi so I was getting pretty apprehensive about the epic running length. But this film, the first in a projected series, only deals with the first two books in the Book of Mormon.

Suitable for the kinderlach. Violent apex is some blood spattering on Nephi. Sexual situations limited to some provocative dancing by the Nephite women. Some pretty fetching halter tops on the sea voyage over.

The darkness of the bad brothers at this film's conclusion portrayed more tastefully than what I'd feared might be coming. They hadn't morphed into African-Americans, but rather had just taken on a browner hue, replete with savage makeup and behavior wailing around the campfire. A refreshing Joseph Smith portrayal to bookend the film, not the beautiful blonde boy we're often treated to in LDS depictions, but a more homely and believable farm boy. Angel Moroni in sore need of recasting. I know who the South Park producers used as their template now when they depicted this angel as a white Native-American.

I attended at the recommendation of an aged church Seventy who beamed about Hollywood production values. I questioned this initially upon watching the film, but then reminded myself that Saturday morning live-action series of my youth like Shazam, Mighty Isis, and the Banana Splits feature Danger Island were likely conceived in Hollywood. So sure, Hollywood production values. Actually there was one unique shot of Laman escaping the clutches of Laban in a long, uninterrupted run down stairs. Flying too fast for a Steadicam. So speedy it had to be mounted on a vehicle of some sort, but quite smooth.

Likely the best Book of Mormon film out there, but the competition's not too stiff. I wish someone with Mel Gibson money, although not his zest for sadism, would turn their film-making efforts to Joseph Smith's literary masterpiece. It might enhance understanding between mainstream Christians and the latter-day Saint tradition churches that sprung up in the 19th century. This film struck me as too boring an initiation ritual into the Book of Mormon, so leave your Goyim buddies at home.

Dirk Ellingson Independence, MO

I really wanted to like this movie; I love The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ. But the movie was like watching a low-budget play. The musical score, which I heard prior to seeing the movie, seemed moving, dramatic and even beautiful. But the movie missed the mark.

ON THE OTHER HAND: those interested in celebrating (or even investigating) Mormonism would be FAR BETTER SERVED watching "The Work and the Glory" - which, while not as doctrinally "heavy" as the Book of Mormon Movie intended to be (and failed), is at least beautifully filmed, well-acted and is simply not painful to watch.

BTW I enjoy the Genesis Project effort to put OT & NT stories on film, sticking to the text. I'm not just against putting scriptural stories on film per se. But this "project" needs more work, and especially more thought.