Hardly a sign of approaching apocalypse, but Hollywood appears to be rediscovering the Bible as epic source material. The Biblical epic was once a movie staple: Cecil B. DeMille’s silent, King of Kings (1927) – remade by Nicholas Ray (1961) – DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956) and William Wyler’s Ben-Hur (1959); George Stevens’ The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) and (for TV) Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth (1977). And then there was Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, truly an outlier in 2004.
But a decade after Passion, comes Christopher Spencer’s re-edit of last year’s Roma Downey-Mark Burnett-produced miniseries, The Bible, in theaters now as Son of God (just New Testament material this go-round). At the end of this month will come Darren Aronofsky’s Noah, and, in December, Ridley Scott’s Exodus, although expect less Bible and more Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in those two, as befits the films’ edgy superstars: Russell (Gladiator) Crowe as Noah and Christian (Batman) Bale as Moses.
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