Evengyny Thanks for the memories!

UnowPriceless hyped garbage

Matialth Good concept, poorly executed.

AshUnow This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Eric Stevenson I don't know why, but it's really easy to find most religious movies online, especially ones with Jesus. I guess it's true that people have learned to share from him! Anyway, I was surprised that this movie, being the longest Jesus movie I've ever seen, didn't start out with Jesus' birth. Of course, it's been awhile since I've read my Bible. It's mostly because I literally can't read my Bible since it's just been ripped apart from how often I used it when I was little. I guess we can just assume this is just what John says about Jesus. If so, it ended up being as amazing as you would imagine.We even get to see Jesus use some authority as he actually scares people off with a whip! I'm a frequent church goer, but we don't seem to really talk that much about the actual narrative. What makes this movie a classic is of course how well it's acted. I mean, this is probably the best Jesus I've ever seen. I'm really surprised that this movie isn't more well known. It's ranked as one of the best religious films ever made! Nowadays, we get awful films like "Saving Christmas" and "Left Behind" that are nothing but crap. This movie perfectly demonstrates exactly what Jesus wants us to believe.It's simply the notion that we shouldn't judge and love everyone. I'm still familiar with the Bible enough to recognize most of what's going on. Of course, it's been done in countless other movies. Every time this guy talks, I completely believe him as Jesus. We just have this great sincerity and wonderful smile from this guy constantly. They even begin by saying that the film is in no way meant to be Anti-Semitic. It's simply amazing that anyone would be this way because it was Jews who wrote most of the Bible. In a modern world where everyone is being torn apart by differences, they're the closest things to Christians.Okay, I know little about Muslims, so I can't really tell for sure. I especially love how Jesus keeps referring to his dad, but he never really mentions that it's God. It's a pretty interesting perspective on him. Yeah, I'd have to read John again to fully understand it. They even got the fact right of how people were nailed in their wrists and not palms to be crucified. Even "The Passion Of The Christ" with how authentic it tried to be got that wrong! It's always important to be accurate and I hope more people are open to this wonderful film. God loves us the way we are. ****

Desertman84 The Gospel of John is a film that is the story of Jesus' life as recounted by the Gospel of John.The film is narrated by Christopher Plummer and stars Henry Ian Cusick as Jesus. Others cast includes Stuart Bunce,Richard Lintern,Scott Handy, Lynsey Baxter,Diego Matamoros, Stephen Russell, Daniel Kash,Cedric Smith and Nancy Palk.It was directed by Philip Saville. It is a motion picture that has been adapted for the screen on a word- for-word basis from the American Bible Society's Good News Bible. This three-hour epic feature film follows John's Gospel precisely, without additions to the story from other Gospels, nor omission of complex passages.This is definitely worth seeing especially for viewers who practice Christianity regardless of denomination despite the fact that it was long, dull and for the most part, acted without apparent inspiration.But nevertheless,it preaches effectively Jesus' message of love.

Miles-10 For my own peculiar reasons, I am always looking for faithful adaptations of the gospels, so I am impressed with the relative faithfulness of "The Gospel of John." It's success, however, does NOT mean that it is perfect and rather says more about the failure of other adaptations of gospels, like the "Gospel According to St. Luke" (1979), that fall shorter of their hype than this movie does. (The "Gospel According to St. Luke" inexplicably puts some scenes in order according to Mark instead of Luke.) Over all, I think this movie is very well made. Despite a few quibbles that I will mention, it is as faithful to the text as I expect a middle-of-the-road interpretation to get. Henry Ian Cusick is not as bad in the role of Jesus as some have said, although I would have to agree with anyone who complains that his smile too often resembles a smirk. Otherwise, I found his portrayal sharp and professional. He risked giving Jesus just a bit of personality, but only a bit, which was a good choice; and, except for the smile that verged on a smirk, he wisely dialed it back and seemed to let the lines themselves guide him.There are arguable minor flaws with this adaptation of "John." There are some insupportably imaginative cinematic interpolations such as the scene where Jesus tells Nathanael that he saw him sitting under a fig tree just before Philip called him. The movie then stages a flashback of Nathanael under the fig tree and having an almost mystical experience. Not only is this flashback not supported in the gospel, but the movie has just staged the calling of Nathanael at his home: Philip knocks on his door and summons him. Evidently, we are to think that Nathanael was sitting under the fig tree quite some time before his summoning, but a perfectly reasonable interpretation based on the text is that Nathanael was outdoors, sitting or having just sat under the tree when Philip called him. Flashbacks are also used throughout to remind us of earlier events in the film. This keeps the pictures moving but does not add to the film's faithfulness to the text of the gospel; it rather gives us an extra-textual interpretation. There is plenty of interpretation of the text because it cannot be helped: the gospel authors did not write their books with the idea in mind of making their stories easier for a screenwriter to break down. Settings and time lines, for example, are not always clear from the text, and, so, dramatists must use their imaginations to connect the dots; this is not always going to be done successfully.Others have noted how this movie gives narrator Christopher Plummer too much heavy lifting to do. He keeps describing things that the camera has already shown to us. This is redundant and not, in my opinion, necessary to qualify as a faithful adaptation. Pictures can stand in for words. That is what movies are about. Sometimes the script even relies on the narrator to tell us what Jesus and others say instead of letting the actors portraying those characters have all of their lines. In the scene where Jesus and Nathanael meet, Jesus's first line is spoken by the narrator and his second by the actor playing Jesus.Since the earliest manuscripts of the gospels do not use punctuation of any kind, it is not only difficult to decide things like whether or not some words are supposed to form dependent or independent clauses but also which verses are intended to be quotations and which are part of the narration. (The style of Jesus's words and John's narration is often indistinguishable.) For example, the movie interprets John 3:10-15 as a quotation from Jesus, but other editors of this gospel have taken only verses 3:10-13 as Jesus's words and verses 3:14-21 to be entirely the evangelist's narrative. Still others think that the entire passage from 3:10-21 should be considered the words of Jesus.The filmmakers imaginatively show the last supper as being a movable feast with the dinner party moving from place to place while Jesus talks. This is not in the Gospel. It is rather the filmmaker's way of "making sense" of the fact that verse 14:31 quotes Jesus as saying "Rise, let us be on our way," (NRSV) but his discourse continues uninterrupted from the next verse, 15:1, until the end of chapter 17, following which Jesus and his disciples are described in verse 18:1 as going out (of what? where?) and thence to a garden.Finally, the role of John (Stuart Bunce) is handled in a traditional way that nicely shows up the insupportability of that traditional interpretation. John is one of Jesus's first two disciples, according to this production, but is not identified until the very end when he is identified without ever being actually named in the text! Verses 21:20-23 in which Jesus and Peter discuss the beloved disciple's fate refer to absolutely no explanation for why they are even discussing this. The author of the text is then referenced in the third person and identified with the beloved disciple (John 21:24-25) as if a later editor slapped these last two verses onto the text without knowing what he was talking about, and therein, alone, lies the identification of the beloved disciple with the evangelist John himself. The movie then ends with a full screen picture of Bunce as John. Well, it was really all about him, I guess.If you have never read the Gospel of John, but were just waiting for them to make it into a movie, you have little excuse now not to see this film. Despite its flaws, this is a good enough adaptation of John's gospel. It is far more faithful than the screen adaptations of most books (albeit, perhaps, way too faithful, especially in its overuse of narration), and the production and entertainment values are well above average.

johnmichael-2 This is a very, very faithful adaptation of the Gospel of John, including every scene from the book with the same dialog, etc. The actors do a great job, and the direction was wonderful. The music also was very good, and the whole thing was just beautiful to watch.However, the faithfulness to the Gospel, while a good thing (its faithfulness helped enable it to skip the controversy that "The Passion" generated), caused a few problems near the end. First, in the book of John, Jesus preaches to his disciples for about 3 chapters during the Last Supper. Let me tell you, that part of the movie was BORING, and seemed to stretch on for nearly half an hour. It was like listening to a sermon--it would have been interesting in church, but had no place in a movie. And the Gospel of John doesn't have as much about the crucification as the other books, so that part of the film was disappointingly anticlimactic.But, all in all, the film was wonderful to watch.