The other day, I went to a Christian book store and bought a DVD set with all 4 Gospel movies in this series. I saw The Gospel of Mark a few years ago and loved it, so I decided to own them all.
Biblical epics are my favorite movie genre, and the closer to Scripture, the better. In fact, earlier this week I saw Pier Paolo Pasolini's The Gospel According To St. Matthew, which is now my favorite Jesus movie.
The Gospel Of Matthew, made from The LUMO Project and released from Lionsgate, is the book, word for word. You can open a Bible to Matthew and literally follow along.
There is a setting on the DVD to watch it in The King James Version and one to watch the New International Version. I'm not a "King James Only" person per se, but I prefer it (call me "King James Leaning"), so I selected that and then I started the movie.
The Gospel of Matthew has many merits, and not just the word for word accuracy. The movie is well shot, mostly entertaining if you like Bible movies, and Selma Rasalingam makes for a good and more historically accurate looking Jesus.
However, notice that I said "mostly entertaining." The biggest problem with The Gospel of Matthew is that the movie is all narrated. Of course, there needs to be a narrator if directly quoting Scripture (they don't even skip the opening 17 verses of Jesus's genealogy), but the narrator says EVERYTHING.
If Jesus speaks, we see His lips move, but the narrator speaks. Same for if John The Baptist, a disciple, or Pilate speaks. The narrator is literally the only voice, even though the actors move their mouths.
I wondered if this was a King James option thing, so after about a half hour, I switched to NIV, but it only has a different narrator doing the same thing. It makes me wonder why the actors couldn't have spoken, and if they have an opinion about this choice of the filmmakers. (If the actors had thick accents, this could have been dubbed over. The Jesus Film did this.)
What's odd is that I didn't remember The Gospel of Mark doing the same thing. However, I looked up The Gospel of Mark on YouTube (it was on there) and I guess that it does?
As a result of this one voice dialogue, while much of the Scriptures were powerful, the monotone, barely dramatized voice got dull at times. I must confess there were times I considered watching something else knowing that this was 3 hours and 10 minutes long.
That said, I did overall enjoy it and still found it to be moving, like most Biblical epics are to me.
If you can get past the one voice narration, I recommend The Gospel of Matthew. If you want to see Matthew with more acting and power, then I recommend The Gospel According To St. Matthew or The Visual Bible: Matthew more. Honestly, I would recommend Godspell more as well.
Again, as a stand alone movie, The Gospel of Matthew is not bad. As a Bible movie, it is good, mostly due to the Biblical accuracy. However, the lack of acting is what keeps it from being great.
Note: The Gospel of Matthew also has a nit pick that I have with other Jesus movies, The Gospel According To St. Matthew being the exception. Matthew 5:1 states that Jesus ignores a crowd to speak The Sermon On The Mount to his disciples. Here, as with most Jesus movies, despite the word for word accuracy, Jesus speaks to the crowd, even though we hear that He sets them aside.
Happy New Year, this is my first review of 2023! :)
