I have purposely stayed away from watching The Passion of the Christ for years because all I've heard about it is how brutal and excessive the violence is in the film. It's not that I'm squeamish. I'm not. I just didn't want to sit through 2 hours of torture and brutalization of Jesus. I actually got the bug to watch this a few weeks ago, but I still kept pushing this off and delaying this as long as I could. Well, to say that this movie is excessive is putting it mildly. It's beyond excessive.

Everyone knows the story of Jesus Christ and the final hours of his life and how brutal it was. But unless you see it in film, I guess you really can't process just how brutal it gets just by reading it as a kid or as an adult. So, I'm not sure if that was the intent of filmmaker Mel Gibson, to drive home what it means to Jesus and to everyone else, the pain he endured for our sins or was the violence ramped up just for the sake of being gratuitous to shock everyone. Personally, I do think it was a bit too much. It was enough to actually get me to tear up a few times at the brutality of what was happening on the screen. And this is coming from someone that is jaded and has seen it all. This was a very hard movie to sit through.

Moving past the violence, I have to single out Jim Caviezel as Jesus. His performance is both amazing and heatbreaking at the same time. Overall, as difficult as it to sit through the film, the movie looks and feels like an epic film. If you like Braveheart and the style invoked in that movie, you will see some of those Gibson touches in this one as well. Despite the controversy surrounding the film, I do think that Gibson did a masterful job in putting this film together.

I will only recommend this as a Rent for those that aren't squeamish. So unless you have a strong stomach, I'd stay away from this. And as much as I applaud what Gibson did with the film, I don't think I will ever watch this again because of the brutality. Just because I'm saying that, it's not a reflection on the movie being bad. Far from it. It's just that I don't have a desire to see this particular violence again anytime soon. So, take what you will from that. One last thing I'd like to address is the resurrection. After sitting through 2 hours of violence, I was really hopeful that the movie would end on a good, uplifting note, namely Jesus' resurrection, which they in fact do. But it doesn't deliver in a way I wanted as a film-goer. It's only given a brief glimpse and then the movie is over.

Are you tempted to visit/revisit Last Temptation at all?

I think "Last Temptation" was the first Scorcese flick I'd ever seen.  Good flick.

Still not interested in checking out Passion, though...

Not really in the mood to see a guy tortured for two hours in a foreign language movie.  Also, went to Catholic school, saw lots of stations of the cross, I did my time.

The Passion of the Christ is still on my mind and I've been reading what I can and decided to check out some documentaries on YouTube. This one in particular is 90 minutes long where scholars, scientist, theologians give their interpretations of the Lost 40 Days. The doc was actually better than I'd thought it would be. Reenactments usually make me cringe because of the low budget look and the actors portraying the characters are never believable. I did find it very interesting how the Computer Artist was able to transform the image as seen on the Shroud into a 3D image and the technical aspect of how they got there.