Good Example Of The Problem Of Religious Films Essay

Films about religion have often been used as evangelical tools, telling the story of a particular religion with the impact and drama of the art of filmmaking. However, major motion pictures often run into a dilemma when conveying religious history and text on screen: finding the balance between fidelity to the source material and dramatic license. Many times, films about religion will take liberties in order to make a more dramatic story – for example, the film The Last Temptation of Christ takes the story of Christ and changes it to make Christ more human, more tortured by the call of being a messiah. Furthermore, it takes the liberty to imagine a crucifixion in which Satan allows Christ to come off the cross and live a long life of marriage and children. Some changes are less subtle, representing the basic story while also focusing on different aspects of the story for the sake of drama – The Passion of the Christ, through its filmmaking techniques, focuses on a gory, almost exploitative crucifixion of Jesus that takes the appeal away from telling Christ’s actual story and focusing on his suffering as a religious message.
While films like these find new ways to express the nuances of their religious stories, they become less able to actually educate their audience about historical religion. The tension between telling an interesting and entertaining story and conveying the message of a religious story is perhaps the hardest part of making religious films. Because of this, filmmakers have to decide to what extent they will put an emphasis on entertainment over offering a documentary-like retelling of historical fiction. To that end, a religious film always interprets and changes a text to a certain extent to fit the format, and this is the hard part of adapting faith to film.