Mythological Movie Recommendation: The Last Temptation of Christ
Image Credit: IMDB
Great stories are about more than the events that transpire around their protagonists. They are about the principles that reflect real-world human development. Those are the types of stories on film I wish to address here, as they have had an uncommonly strong effect on my development. I hope to help introduce these influential stories to people who haven’t seen them and wouldn’t be likely to ever watch them on their own. Though many of these are among the most popular and successful movies ever made, general audiences still often overlook their subtle profundity. Even movies that have already been analyzed to death can still be assessed through a different lens. Great art always leaves more to be revealed and gifts us more to learn from.
Thematic discussion only ahead. No spoilers.
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How does a man become a messiah? What must he endure before is ready for the incalculable burden of saving the world? Can his faith in this path ever truly be unshakeable?
The Last Temptation of Christ is notorious and noteworthy for depicting a profoundly flawed, human, and at times, broken version of a figure we are accustomed to seeing portrayed as unwavering and perfect. This Jesus is not an embodied paragon from immaculate conception until death, resurrection, and ascension into heaven. He is blasphemous and insulting to the traditional conception of the Christian messiah, or so it seems at first. His real role is to speak to the human hero seeking to be worthy of Godhood in all of us.
This sympathetic version of Christ is a man who seeks to live rightly but is overwhelmed by the burden of his role in the grand scheme of things, both human and divine. There is too much earthly strife to make peace of and too much spiritual warring in his soul between his Father, who art in heaven, and the sweet acceptance of the devil here on Earth. The voice of God in his head is a torment he has to learn to come to terms with, not a divine blessing or a calling to be proud of.
This Christ is neither God nor man. He embodies a middle category containing no other members but himself—a deity in development. His quest is to discover whether he can fully embrace both categories and resolve the dichotomy in his soul between seemingly incompatible ends or to even choose one path over the other with all his soul.
By bravely distancing itself from the gospel version of events, The Last Temptation of Christ masterfully subverts, before ultimately synthesizing and embellishing, the spiritual themes of the story we all know. By giving the “perfect” character of Christ a flawed heroic character arc, the movie opens His struggle to a wider base of appreciation beyond conventional dogma. Christ is now grounded in universal principles that people of any spiritual persuasion (or none at all) can relate to and learn from.
The titular “last temptation” that this Jesus must overcome before fully embracing his much-lamented destiny on the cross is so well executed that it will genuinely shock those going into the film for the first time who think they know where the classic story must be going. It changes just enough to add new depth to a timeless tale without fundamentally breaking it, which is a masterful accomplishment for any storyteller. Devout Christians will likely be inclined to reject this version of Christ at first exposure, but those who commit to earnestly exploring where the film takes them may just find an even deeper appreciation of their hero, including why they are called to be like Him and why it matters so much when the trumpets sound, and he can call out in triumph to the heavens that “it is accomplished.” It’s a statement of his ascension into the person he was born the be, the fulfillment of his destiny, and the synthesis of divinity and humanity because he has been allowed to explore both. And now salvation is available to the rest of us.
“My principal anguish and the source of all my joys and sorrows from my youth onward has been the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh.”
Nikos Kazantzakis, The Last Temptation