Mel Gibson's 'Passion' fuels religious films

Mel Gibson has a lot to answer for.

It has been nearly two years since Mr. Gibson's self-financed biblical epic The Passion of the Christ was released theatrically, and the reverberations from the film are still being felt. Using Christ as a model, filmmakers, including Mr. Gibson, are hoping to ape the film's success by borrowing some of the more unusual Christ aspects and using them in their own projects.

The first out of the gate will be The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe on Dec. 9. Although an early review in Newsweek states that the film adaptation of C.S. Lewis' allegorical novel is only as religious as an audience wanted to make it, early marketing has focused not only on the basement-dwelling hobbit-heads who still wax poetic over the wonders of The Lord of the Rings but also church groups, which see the story as a metaphor for Jesus' resurrection. Imagine, dungeon masters and deacons in the same audience.

There's also a rumor floating about that an adaptation of John Milton's 1667 open-verse poem Paradise Lost is gearing up for production. The poem, which takes an extraordinarily long time to describe Adam and Eve's fall from grace, has never been made into a movie because, well, it's a poem, it's long and it's full of naked people talking with Satan.

Passion, however, has taught us that obstacles are just opportunities, at least when it comes to religious filmmaking. Two years ago, few people would have talked about scourging in reference to the Crucifixion, but Mr. Gibson made a painful point of it. Comparatively speaking, having a couple of actors rock the fig leaves seems mild.

Even Mr. Gibson isn't beyond going back to the well.

He held a news conference this week announcing the start of his new film, Apocalypto. Like Passion, which featured dialogue in the dead language of Aramaic, Apocalypto, which Mr. Gibson described as an "action-adventure of epic proportions," will feature dialogue spoken in Mayan.

It's interesting that The Passion of the Christ, a film many pundits initially dismissed as a vanity project, has become the new Hollywood paradigm.

Where big-bang action flicks and buddy cops once were the standard, now we're looking at studio heads trying to find Sanskrit scholars and theologians with stars in their eyes.

Extrapolating this trend to its most extreme end - where the red carpet beautiful are replaced by tweedy academics come Oscar night - is foolish. Then again, that's what critics said about The Passion of the Christ about $600 million ago.

Reach Steven Uhles at (706) 823-3626 or steven.uhles@augustachronicle.com.