The Bible (2013)

Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

This is one of those series that get hit from both sides. It radicalizes and polarizes both sides on the political spectrum, and the religious spectrum and draws hatred from the fanatics on both sides.If you read the reviews:The far right uber-religious are crying about how Biblically inaccurate this is...and that means that they missed the "mini-series" part of production. Really, how are you going to make it accurate to the Bible and watchable for the general public? I used to work in history and that was a HUGE pet peeve of mine. "Saving Private Ryan would have been good but this, this, and this were inaccurate and..." WHO CARES????!!!!!!!Do you honestly want an entire two-hour episode of David sitting down writing Psalms? That's really not going to be entertaining. The same goes with long winded rehearsals of who begot whom, which are also guaranteed to put the public to sleep.If you want a literal interpretation of the book...buy and read the book. Otherwise you will have a faithful depiction at best, but never a truly accurate one.You can't even translate Harry Potter 100% accurately into a film and those novels are a lot less, well, Biblical. So, chill, take a seat, and be entertained.The series might be made to educate, but it's education for entertainment as implied by the word "dramatization." And moving across the alley you have far left fanatics yelling that both the book and this series should be banned. Yelling that they are harmful, that they are dangerous.......and I guess they are forgetting that people said the exact same things about "Howl" when it was published, and if you live in America and have that view, you should be seriously ashamed of yourself.There is something inherently wrong about censoring thought and speech. Chill, this is an AMERICAN production and over here, if you want to worship the stick you found in the parking lot last Tuesday...and then make a movie about it, that's your Constitutionally protected right as stated in the 1st Amendment.If you have an issue with that, move someplace that censors thought, religion, and speech. The rest of us are perfectly happy that we won't get thrown in jail for not sharing the same views as whomever is in power at the moment.So...if you think about it, if you really think about it, the Bible did a FANTASTIC job in dramatizing the Bible if it's getting it from both sides. The far left is not happy with it and the far right is not happy with it...and that generally means I'm going to be pretty happy with it.And I was, as someone that spent most of his adult life working around history...well...is there a word that best explains salivating in nerd fueled bliss?It was awesome. Like The Da Vinci Code (book not movie) the little chapters were just long enough to draw you in and short enough not to get dull. But, the historian in me absolutely loved how well it showed the the stories and people were inter-connected...and that is really an aspect of the Bible that you do NOT get when you go to church.So you have a bunch of short interconnected stories that sort of turns the Bible into a "Pulp Fiction" styled miniseries and just sits really well for entertainment purposes.For real entertainment purposes, spending more time on Judges, where you get the bulk of the nation building and the only real stories that you liked when your parents forced you at gunpoint to go to CCD as a child, would have been preferable. Yeah Moses and Noah are OK, but really you want to hear more about Samson and the high adventure stories...the ones that you liked as a little kid because it read kind of like Robert E. Howard...But I guess focusing only on those stories wouldn't make The Bible as epic in scope as the miniseries became.And, I feel because of that need to be more epic you had what so many other people complained about...SAMURAI NINJA WARRIOR VR TROOPER ANGELSAnd unlike the political and religious zealot complaints...the Samurai Angels were really a valid complaint. That just hurt to see. I WOULD have given it 10 stars because it was super entertaining...but Ninja Warrior Angels. You can't suspend your disbelief enough not to do a spit-take when you see them.They were so bad.But fortunately they were also short lived.So...don't turn it off when you see them. It's a good dramatization to sit back and watch, and the strongest part is honestly the length of the little chapters. It makes it perfect for viewing.

I got this gift as a Christmas present in 2013. It took me nearly half a year to get into. I had heard some middling reviews and wasn't overly impressed by the "Son of God" theater spin-off. When I finally gave it go, however, I discovered that each episode kept building and left me wanting more."The Bible" is pretty much split into two halves: The first half tells a number of Old Testament stories (Abraham, David, Daniel, Samson, etc.), while the second half transitions into the New Testament, telling of the ministry of Jesus Christ and his subsequent crucifixion/resurrection.The first couple of episodes of this series are "just okay". I felt they made too big of a point to showcase the brutal violence of the Old Testament era. As such, I kind of dragged myself into those early episodes. They aren't terrible (I could still appreciate the stories being told), but just not entirely focused.Once I was about 3-4 episodes in, however, the drama/stories/characters really started to pick up and I watched the final few episodes over the span of hours, not days. Whatever you do, PLEASE DO NOT compare this to "Son of God" that was patched-together and released into theaters to capitalize on the success of this show. "Son of God" isn't bad...just bland. "The Bible", on the other hand, is filled with emotion, especially during the "passion" scenes involving Jesus. It was that emotion that kept me watching.In terms of accurateness, I had no problems with "The Bible". I'm not a huge biblical scholar, but I did attend Sunday School and thus know my basic bible stories (!). Besides a few tiny little nit- picks here and there, I found nothing major to criticize here.Finally, "The Bible" can also serve as a great history of the Jewish religion. Creator/producer Mark Burnett does a great job of telling a coherent, structural history of the Jews, complete with narration to "fill in the gaps".Overall, then, I feel "The Bible" to be one of the best Biblical works of film ever produced. Once you get through the first couple of episodes that focus a bit too much on the violence, you'll find yourself getting sucked into the history and emotion of the stories being told.

This 10-part History Channel miniseries is produced by Mark Burnett and Roma Downey. They are the stories from the bible starting with God telling the childless Abraham to bring his wife Sarah and tribe to new lands yet revealed. The production is workmanlike in both the good and bad sense of the word. The product looks well-made if somewhat uninspired. There are no big name stars in the series. It may be both intentional as well as budgetary. The effects are as good as can be expected. The stories have been cleaned up a bit. The first glaring example is Lot who confronts the mob outside. "Look, I have two daughters who have never slept with a man. Let me bring them out to you, and you can do what you like with them. But don't do anything to these men, for they have come under the protection of my roof." I understand why that has to be cut out for modern ears. So this is not a word for word reproduction which is fine by me. The end result is that this is a reasonable distillation of the Bible. It has pace. It looks good. It doesn't shy away from the violence and the grittiness. It's a good watch for young people learning the Bible.

Elisheba, I really liked your review about how the producers 'whitewashed' parts of The Bible.However, in your comments about Lot, you could have added the extra little horror in that story, concerning incest where those two very young daughters - and in the TV series they do look extremely young (I must admit I had always assumed them to be in their late teens) - take turns having sex with their father.I am not sure how often this quaint story gets told in its entirety in Sunday Schools across the United States, especially if one is using the racy New Living Translation of The Bible, where nothing is held back - unlike the King James' version where people 'know' each other. That's what I grew up on and no one explained 'know' to me when I was young: it was quite an eye-opener when I chanced on the New Living Translation! One can certainly see how one gets one's morals from The Bible - God thought Lot was the only one worth saving in Sodom; he was a true moral role model for all of us! I wrote the above a few days ago and then I thought I'd add something more about Biblical horror stories. The story of Abraham and Isaac came to mind; that surely must be one of the most appalling stories in the whole Bible; and as I was thinking of the scene shown in the TV version, I realised that the programme wasn't following the story I know and love so well! The Bible refers to a ram with his horns caught in a thicket. I really have to wonder why the producers decided to substitute a lamb or kid with its hoof caught in the cleft of a tree.I've added a Spoiler Alert as I'm not sure if some viewers might be expecting The Bible 'warts and all'. And also some viewers, like me, might be expecting a ram in the hideous Abraham story.* * * * * * * * * *I also have to say that I found the way the producers of 'The Bible' combined the Creation story with the story of Noah very well done. Neat!However, I do have a few problems with both stories. I have always understood that Abraham was the 'founder' of the monotheistic religion of Judaism, having just the single God, Jahweh. As far as I know Abraham is supposed to have lived somewhere around 2000 B.C.E. And Noah of flood fame lived some 900 years earlier. My problem is this: if Noah lived so long before monotheism was established, how did Noah know that it was God, with a capital 'G' - the later God of the Jews - who ordered him to build an Ark; surely Noah would have worshipped a whole panoply of gods - he wouldn't have known there was only one God. I can just imagine this scenario: Noah coming into the family kitchen and announcing the great news of the coming flood, and Mrs Noah saying, "That's nice, dear. By the way, which god did you say it was? The god of the sea or the god of rain? That would be typical of either of them, wouldn't it! So angry they always are!"And then during the fearsome storm, where we get glimpses of a lonely llama in a stall, when Noah was describing Creation, he referred to God as though he knew there was only one god. How's this possible?I also noticed that the producers of 'The Bible' didn't go with the first chapter of Genesis where God, again with a capital 'G' some 2000 years before the establishment of monotheism, created both man and woman at the same time. The producers went with the much more likely story in Chapter 2 of creating Adam out of mud, rather than the completely unbelievable 'evolution' route. Of course creating man out of mud or clay has always proved a really tried and trusted method - so many cultures around the world have favoured this way of creating humans: the Egyptians with Khnum, known as The Potter; the Greeks with Prometheus; in the Babylonian creation epic 'Enuma Elish', the goddess Ninhursag was said to have created humans from clay; in Sumerian mythology, the birth goddess Nammu, of the watery depths, was said to have moulded clay into the shapes of humans; the Mayans, the Maoris of New Zealand, the Yoruba of West Africa and the Chinese all have similar myths, to name but a few. With so much stunningly convincing evidence, the mud/clay/dust method was definitely the way to go.Whoever came up with such an asinine idea as evolution? How could we humans possibly have evolved from an early ancestor common to both the great apes and hominids? Who do these scientists, paleontologists, evolutionary biologists, etc. think they are? Scientists are always so arrogant when they propose their ridiculous hypotheses, spend years and years of their lives in detailed research, sometimes doubting their findings, and finally they produce a theory, submitting their work in peer-reviewed publications to have it minutely examined by the greatest minds in the particular field. Such arrogance! When it is all so obvious that all that was needed was a group of bronze-age herdsmen in the Middle East sitting round their fire of a night and one of them announcing: "I was listening to that Egyptian fellow who arrived here yesterday. He told a wonderful story about their god Khnum, I think he said it was. This god, he said, made all men in his own likeness out of clay on a potter's wheel. I've already told my children this story, you know. And they really loved it..." So convincingly obvious! So thoroughly believable! Any humble believer just knows the truth when he hears it.