Aliens in This World

An ordinary Catholic and a science fiction and fantasy fan.

Saturday, July 12, 2003

Trailer for Mel Gibson's The Passion



I downloaded the trailer tonight from Ain't It Cool News. It looks very good.



Brief rundown of scenes:
The ever-nifty logo for Icon Productions. (Fitting!)
Jesus looking at a torch. (Garden of Gethsemane at night.)
Something flying through the air -- it's a bag of silver being thrown to Judas Iscariot. He catches it clumsily and the silver spills all over. (Seems to be set somewhere in the Temple.)
It's bluish night, and a hollow-eyed woman in a dark mantle/cloak looks up at us. She looks down and sees a snake winding its way across the grass. (A pinkish snake with dark spots.)
Jesus getting scourged at the pillar by Roman soldiers. Very bloody and convincing.
Mary starts and looks around as if awakened from a dream. She is _very_ Mom-looking -- by which I mean she has some mileage on her. Unless the hollow-eyed woman is Mary and this is Mary Magdalene...and I don't see that, to be honest.
More scourging. Eugh.
The crowd goes wild in a bad way.
Roman soldiers move in to keep order.
Pontius Pilate's place.
Pontius shows off an incredibly bloody Jesus with the words "Ecce homo." (Pronounced not like Church/Medieval Latin, but definitely not Classical Latin, either. Ech-che ah-mo. I look forward to learning more about Latin pronunciation of the time.) The crowd goes wild again.
Jesus looks around.
Blood on the pavement.
Jesus starts off carrying his cross. We see Mary (and other friends) moving sideways through the crowd.
We see the hollow-eyed chick moving through the crowd on the other side of the road. And this has got to be some sort of symbolic representation of Death or something, because honestly, she looks like she works the counter at Four Horsemen Rent-a-Plague.
Jesus turns his head, and nail hammering ensues. EUUUUGH! Tastefully done -- we don't actually see the nailing itself -- but something about the way they press the nail into Jesus' palm is just EUUUGH! Oh, yeah, this is going to be waaaay realistic, folks.
Jesus hangs on the cross. You can see the whole town from here. *shiver* We hear just the beginning of "Eli, Eli". A woman looks up at him. (I bet _that's_ Mary Magdalene.)
Mary, her face bloody from her Son's wounds (WOW! What an image!), stands looking up with John behind her. We see Jesus on the cross again. He looks dead.
Mary holds the dead body of Jesus; John and Mary Magdalene (or one of the Maries, anyway) are helping. Mary is staring out at something only she sees.
Death is staring out again in the bluish not-night. The snake shows up again.
A sandaled foot STOMPS that snake a good one!
A man wearing Jewish clothes (presumably Jesus without all the blood) stands up and looks out at the screen. (And yes, he looks substantial enough to be a carpenter.) He looks very serious, but then there's just a hint that He's about to smile....
The title "The Passion" appears. (Unfortunately, in a twee-looking font.)



All in all, a good trailer. However, I think working the symbolism in with the Death figure...well, I was confused on who the women were. On the first viewing, I thought Mary, Death, and Mary Magdalene were all the same person, thanks to the (realistically) similar mantles. The action scenes were good, though, and the snake-stomping was excellent! But yeah, the realistic treatment of the Passion is going to be easily as difficult to watch as Schindler's List. And rightly so.



Anyway, thank you, Harry Knowles, for putting the trailer for The Passion up on your site!



And now, since it's almost four in the morning, I'm going to bed. Somewhat more coherent commentary in the morning.

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