...which is precisely why so many people can't handle it. Gibson could have toned everything down, but then would have been met with apathy or mockery. Both the absurd accusations of antisemitism (in a movie where almost all the characters are Jewish, and where the Romans soldiers are more brutally inhuman than anyone else), and the hypocritical criticism of the violence (there are only TWO sequences in the movie that are difficult to watch, and the first---the scourging---happens around 50 minutes in) are overblown and hyped up because these are the only criticisms people can latch on to. You can't fault the dialogue and line delivery because it's not even in English. You can't fault the direction because the minimal dialogue leads to a more visual story. The soundtrack is criminally underrated by itself. And so on. It is too well made and was way too popular to simply dismiss, and that's why it was so controversial.
The violence criticisms are especially silly given that we live in this culture where audiences and critics regularly gush over shows where graphic violence is played for laughs (Fight Club), nihilism (Game of Thrones), or both (Tarantino). Is it so horrifying that a film appears which demands you take the implications of brutality seriously? Who is really the degenerate here, Mel Gibson or American society as a whole? That being said, there is an anguish which pervades every frame of this film and I could maybe see how that can color people's perception and memory of the violence. Even Roger Ebert, one of the few critics who 'got' the film, estimated that '100 minutes, maybe more' of this two hour film was concerned with graphic torture. His calculations are way off. The people calling this a 'snuff film' obviously haven't watched it and are just parroting that one loser critic. (The Passion is obviously not a 'snuff film' anyway--you're supposed to feel emotional connection to the characters and not just sadism. Some of the Rotten Tomatoes critics are obviously very anti-Christian, and expecting them to give a reliable evaluation to this movie would be like expecting anti-Semites to review Schindler's List fairly.)
Do you have to be religious to 'get' this film? Not particularly, the same way you do not have to be religious to appreciate Renaissance art, much of which seems to have influenced the film. It's also interesting how relatively influential it was, given the smattering of 'visionary' Biblical epics that sprang up in its wake but were consigned to mediocrity. (Ridley Scott's Moses film and Aronofsky's gnostic Noah film).
Side note: The soundtrack for this film is on another level. If you like lots of percussion and vocals in your epic soundtracks, try checking it out. Even if you don't intend to watch the movie.
