The stories of David, Samuel, and Saul are recorded in great detail in the books of Samuel, as well as additional information in the books of Chronicles. Considering the wealth of information and detail we have from the Biblical sources, there's not much need to go outside of the text to create a great movie. The most obvious climax of David's life comes early on in his life (his confrontation with Goliath), and the Biblical text in 1st Samuel reads just like an action movie. Had the filmmakers just stuck with the text, they would have hit a homerun. Instead, they bunted into foul territory... or struck out while messing themselves. Just a complete waste of what should have been a great scene. Very inaccurate to the Biblical story and very disappointing. I stopped watching after David took the throne as I couldn't deal with it any more.
This is coming from the perspective of a Christian that believes the Bible is the the inspired and infallible Word of God. If you do not hold to these beliefs, this may be a good movie for you (I can't say as I didn't finish it and my perspective is completely skewed). If you do, you will likely be disappointed like I was.
I find movies based on Scripture to be very touchy in general, and extremely difficult to translate to the screen without something coming across as inaccurate (or what we perceive as inaccurate). Even movies that supposedly stick word for word to the text still take artistic license (as you have to since you're translating the written word to a visual medium).
This one was overall NOT a good translation from the first half that I saw. I'm not going to point out the accurate parts as they were negated by the inaccuracies. Even from the beginning of the movie Saul was not taller than the other Israelites, which is clearly described in Scripture. I'll quit there, as there are a lot of other things I could point out.
