Product Description

James Caviezel, Monica Bellucci. Mel Gibson's powerful and poignant epic following Jesus' betrayal by Judas, his horrific torture at the hands of Roman governor Pontius Pilate and ultimate crucifixion. 2004/color/127 min/R/fullscreen & widescreen.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2137 in DVD
• Brand: FOX Home Entertainment
• Released on: 2004-08-31
• Rating: Unrated
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, DVD, Full Screen, Subtitled, NTSC
• Original language: Hebrew
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish
• Dimensions: .22 pounds
• Running time: 127 minutes

Amazon.com

After all the controversy and rigorous debate has subsided, Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ will remain a force to be reckoned with. In the final analysis, "Gibson's Folly" is an act of personal bravery and commitment on the part of its director, who self-financed this $25-30 million production to preserve his artistic goal of creating the Passion of Christ ("Passion" in this context meaning "suffering") as a quite literal, in-your-face interpretation of the final 12 hours in the life of Jesus, scripted almost directly from the gospels (and spoken in Aramaic and Latin with a relative minimum of subtitles) and presented as a relentless, 126-minute ordeal of torture and crucifixion. For Christians and non-Christians alike, this film does not "entertain," and it's not a film that one can "like" or "dislike" in any conventional sense. (It is also emphatically not a film for children or the weak of heart.) Rather, The Passion is a cinematic experience that serves an almost singular purpose: to show the scourging and death of Jesus Christ in such horrifically graphic detail (with Gibson's own hand pounding the nails in the cross) that even non-believers may feel a twinge of sorrow and culpability in witnessing the final moments of the Son of God, played by Jim Caviezel in a performance that's not so much acting as a willful act of submission, so intense that some will weep not only for Christ, but for Caviezel's unparalleled test of endurance.

Leave it to the intelligentsia to debate the film's alleged anti-Semitic slant; if one judges what is on the screen (so gloriously served by John Debney's score and Caleb Deschanel's cinematography), there is fuel for debate but no obvious malice aforethought; the Jews under Caiaphas are just as guilty as the barbaric Romans who carry out the execution, especially after Gibson excised (from the subtitles, if not the soundtrack) the film's most controversial line of dialogue. If one accepts that Gibson's intentions are sincere, The Passion can be accepted for what it is: a grueling, straightforward (some might say unimaginative) and extremely violent depiction of the Passion, guaranteed to render devout Christians speechless while it intensifies their faith. Non-believers are likely to take a more dispassionate view, and some may resort to ridicule. But one thing remains undebatable: with The Passion of the Christ, Gibson put his money where his mouth is. You can praise or damn him all you want, but you've got to admire his chutzpah. --Jeff Shannon

DVD features
By including no supplemental features (not even the theatrical trailer), The Passion of the Christ maximizes its disc space to create one of the best-looking and best-sounding DVDs available. The picture and colors are sharp and vivid, and the soundtrack is powerful and envelops the viewer with surround effects. The original Aramaic, Latin, and Hebrew language track is available in DTS and Dolby 5.1, and there's also an audio-described track for the visually impaired (in which a narrator recounts the on-screen action in English). Subtitle options are English, English for the hearing impaired (which in addition to the dialogue describes sound effects such as "[yelling]"), and Spanish. --David Horiuchi

From The New Yorker
Mel Gibson's bloody re-creation of the last twelve hours in the life of Jesus is one of the cruellest movies in the history of the cinema. Gibson and the screenwriter Benedict Fitzgerald selected and enhanced incidents from the four Gospels and collated them into a single, surpassingly violent narrative in which the incomparable glories of Jesus' temperament-the joyousness, the brilliance, the heart-stopping eloquence-are all but effaced by the spectacle of his physical destruction. The lashing and flaying, often in slow-motion, go on forever, and Gibson displays a curious technical fascination with the details of crucifixion-huge nails being hammered into hands and feet, with James Caviezel's Jesus howling at each blow. Here and there, the movie has a kind of grim power, and Caleb Deschanel's even gray lighting at the Crucifixion is stunning, but this is a sickening, unilluminating, and ignorant show. The filmmakers have also changed in small ways a number of things from the Gospels and ignored what historians know of ancient Judea, all with the result of making the Jewish leaders more, and the Roman leaders less, responsible for the death of Jesus. It's a deeply angry film, and one wonders how believers can react to it with anything but guilt, fear, or loathing. -David Denby
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker