Stream it now The Last Temptation of Christ 1988

 

Jesus of Nazareth is undeniably a great character. Just like every other great character in history, people will always attracted to him; out of love, hate, adoration, or any emotional response.

I can't count how many movies were made about Jesus. From the story of his birthday to his ministries to his death and for the believers, his triumph over death.

This movie is a great portrayal of the complex Jesus of Nazareth. It might offend some people who look at Jesus from traditional/religious point of view for Jesus is so human in this movie. He has human emotions; he can experience doubt, fear, pain, and anger. He's not the "meek and mild" Jesus who can easily fit inside anyone's box.

To really understand and love a great human, we should see him/her from a point of view that opposed ours.

AMAZING!!! This is just as good as passion of christ it had as much contraversy surrounding it at the time it came out Mel Gibson just made a clearer version of what this director Was Working tawords .. I love how they show the ressurection and the suffering on the hill for 40 days and nights it covers allot of things that I wounderd about .. in the end they show that its possible he did not die on the cross Their have been holy wars over that for years and more to come Its nice to see some directors stepp out of the box and take a chance on a risky film I get goosbumps Just thinkin about what will come next :)!

To those overly-pious critics of this film on the grounds that it is blasphemous, may I suggest they watch it again and try to understand its content. The clue is in the title! Faced with the most tortious death, Christ had the power to remove himself from the agony of the cross and exist as a normal man. During his final hours, such a thought must have been prevalent, yet, despite the alternative, He chose to suffer. Martin Scorsese handled this delicate subject with a touch of mastery. Not an easy film to watch, it is nevertheless one of the best made covering its subject. It is a scandal that many powerful figures in the church (who probably failed to see the film in its entirety) prevented what was close to being a masterpiece from being given its rightful status in the film hall of fame.

This movie is incredibly interesting because it can both offend and influence devout Christians. The moments before Jesus's crusifiction is the main focus of this movie. It says that while on the cross Jesus is visited by his guaridian angel and told that he is not the son of god. The angel takes Jesus off the cross and gives him a second chance to live his life. Jesus then has sex with Mary Magdalene and does all the things that normal men get to indulge in. This offends many Christians and should. But it is the end result of the movie that should influence and inspire Christians. In the end Jesus finds out that the guardian angel is the devil in disguise and Jesus begs for forgiveness and wants to die for the sins of the world. He is then place back on the cross and dies. This movie is trying to get across that Jesus is both god AND man. He has the same temptations and feelings that a mortal man would have. Also, the cast of actors is fantastic( and even a little bit funny). Willem Dafoe as Jesus, Harvey Keitel as Judas, and David Bowie as Pontius Pilate. This is one of my favorite movies of all time and it is a momentous feat in movie history.

The Last Temptation of Christ is a really weird movie. The subject matter is extremely compelling, but there is a very uneven quality to this Scorsese film. I admit I have not read the book that the movie is based on, but I've heard Scorsese discuss it when he talks about his adaptation. It's kind of funny how bent out of shape people apparently got over the subject matter, despite plenty of evidence and admissions that this was NOT adapted from the Bible, but from a self-proclaimed fictional interpretation of Jesus' rise and fall. I've heard a lot about Last Temptation, but I only recently was able to get around to seeing it. It has to be regarded as one of Scorsese's lesser works.

While I found the subject matter extremely interesting (basically interpreting Christ's life as a HUMAN, as it was and how he MIGHT have wanted it to be if he were free to be less than God intended), I was surprised to see two wildly successful actors perform so unevenly. Willem Dafoe and Harvey Keitel are great actors, but I really didn't care enough for their performances in Last Temptation. I similarly didn't care for a lot of the supporting acting as well. Sometimes it came off as what you might see on one of those religious TV stations when they do made-for-Christian-TV movies that are grainy and poorly-acted. Perhaps people who loved Dafoe's performance haven't seen enough of the bad Jesus actors to understand that he could have done so much better. Don't get me wrong, he's a very capable Jesus, I just expected something a little more daring, especially considering some of the elements that Scorsese used to set the movie apart from other Christ adaptations (sex, nudity, unhidden blood, an honest-to-man Christ that is capable of anger and regret and despair, Christ married with children, etc.).

And here again is where things get uneven. A lot of the dialogue is clumsy, weaving from fictional lines into Bible quotes back to fiction. Some of the parables are fictional and Biblical. Scorsese himself has said time and again his goal was not to make a Bible-story, but an adaptation of the fictional book. So I think his mission would have been more successful if he hadn't gone back and forth so much. I liked how some of the stories played out fictionally from an actual Bible story (the scene where the man that Jesus raises from the dead is killed by conspirators trying to snuff out Christ's accomplishments), which is very daring and not what most people would expect. But often these stories didn't deviate, and I was often left wondering if some aspect of the story was going to go somewhere like the last one, only nothing would happen.

I like to watch a movie before I check how long it is, because this says a lot about the movie. If it's very short, but feels like an eternity, it's probably a terrible movie. If it's very long, and feels like it was very short, it's probably very efficient and gripping enough to make the time pass quickly. If it's very long, and feels very, very long, there's something wrong. The Last Temptation could have done with a lot of editing--basically focusing more on the fictional aspects of Christ's human life rather than leaning on the Bible-Christ all too much. I was so looking forward to seeing how Christ would imagine his life if he had been able to marry and live the way he wanted instead of for God. But by the time that aspect of the story came around, I was fatigued from the rest of the movie, and I couldn't entirely enjoy that part because I was hoping for the movie to end soon. This is a movie that dragged on longer than it needed to in order to get its point across.

While I loved the idea of seeing Christ as a human being and not the supernatural being that the Bible makes him out to be, The Last Temptation of Christ could have been shorter and more efficient. The uneven acting performances and dialogue make the movie feel longer than it really is. This is a highly ambitious movie, and it's the sort of movie that Scorsese would justly be referred to as the only man who would be able to get away with it, but it's sadly one of his lesser works and could have used more focus. I can't downgrade it, because it can be so interesting if the little things don't distract the viewer, and it's always refreshing to see Christ portrayed in a non-Biblical light.

My favourite movie that tells the story of Jesus in a way that normal everyday people can relate to him.

Loved it more than possible

Plays out more like a sci-fi flick where you get to see the results of the more appealing choice. The film has an excellent score by Peter Gabriel and the usual Scorsese touch is not enough to save the monotonous storytelling and odd casting choices.Not to mention the historical and Biblical inaccuracies, which aren't able to make us forget the fact that this is more of a "what if" movie.

Thats the best and most realstic Jesus Adaption ever William Dafoe as schizophrenic Jesus is hillarious also Harvey Keitel as Judas

Scorsese has a long street of very solid films, but this is the one in which he really goes for something epic and pours his heart it. It follows not the random accounts of Jesus as told through the Gospel, but creates a largely fictional narrative out of the emotional and spiritual context - and in doing so I would say arrives closer to the truth than most churches do. Additionally, we hear what Jesus preached but how easily people misrepresented it as talk of violence or hell & brimstone - which is something so common but we can't blame him for it.

It succeeds so massively because it manages to portray Jesus as human, and in this way his sacrifice becomes much more valid and powerful. He might have had visuals, he might have been certain in his heart - but at the end he had a human mind and a human body subject to all our doubts, temptations and pain.

I thought at first William Defoe might have been miscast, but he delivers such a masterful performance he more than makes up for it. Harvey Keital as Judas is brilliant too.

It isn't perfect though, and at times it becomes a bit too David Lynch for my taste. It just goes overboard a few times at its attempts at being deviating and strange, and that breaks the emotional connection. This flaw drags the whole movie down a bit, but not by that much.

What I thought really worked though was the ending - the last temptation itself. The whole "alternate life vision" again walked the line of getting a bit too weird, but the tie-up, although expected, was chilling, grand and beautiful.

Best Jesus movie ever made, easily. And one of the most underrated of all time. 8.5/10