“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.” This quote is from the movie that has been tied with the Titanic with the most Academy Awards ever, Ben- Hur. There have been many films that take scenes and ideas from this old classic movie. Ben-Hur was the first movie that had a ship scene; this famous scene is parodied quite often. This movie is definitely a classic for because many movies try to/ take parts of this movie or ideas and put them into their movies. Saturday Night Live has parodied this movie, Little Rascals took the chariot scene’s wheels as did Grease. This is why this movie was awarded the most Academy Awards ever.
The movie is based around “Jesus’ time” and even has Jesus and his family in Ben-Hur. I thought the way they portrayed Jesus was well done. They never show his face, but the director made had the actor do many things Jesus would do in that time for people and how he treated them, the accuracy was very impressive. I believe Ben-Hur was supposed to be a character a lot like Jesus. There were many things that showed how important and amazing Jesus really was and still is. This film, since it is during Jesus’ time, there is a struggle against Jews and Romans. This struggle is shown a lot between two characters, Messala (Roman) and Ben-Hur (Jew).
Some other things that impressed me in this film were how they showed how during that time a disease that was feared by everyone was Leprosy. During this time period people believed that Leprosy was contagious and if you got too close to one with leprosy or breathed on by someone with the disease that you would get it. The fear was very clearly shown in the movie when even a blind, poor man who had suspected the coin that was dropped into his cup was from a person with Leprosy dumped the coin out of the cup. Now we know that this disease that was caused by bacteria that ate away at your flesh was in fact not contagious.
The line “You either help me, or you oppose me” was from this classic movie. How many times do you hear this line? Quite a lot- “You’re either with me, or against me.” One other thing that is very amazing in this movie and something that was never shown in a movie till Ben-Hur was the famous chariot scene, many people were said to have disappeared in the making of this movie, what the movie and this scene may be the reason why people went missing from the set. There were also so many people involved in making this movie (the cast in the beginning of this movie and also the chariot scenes cast/crowd in the stands).
I would have to rate this movie a 7 out of 10. It was not my favorite movie or something I would watch again, it was not extremely intresting to me. I did not hate the movie or think it was the worst movie I have ever watched. However, I do think that it is a movie everyone should watch, since it is in fact, a classic. The ship scenes and chariot scenes you will watch in other movies will always speak volumes of the movie, Ben-Hur.
A site that helped me was:
- http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052618/quotes
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