Joseph Fiennes portrays Roban tribune Clavius in Risen.

I reviewed the new film Risen last week at Christ and Pop Culture, starting with this:

Risen is a very good film that just happens to be marketed to faith-based audiences.

Please don’t be fooled. I am a skeptic — not of Jesus’s bodily resurrection, which serves as the historical basis for Risen’s story — but of “Christian” movies. I don’t dislike their idea, because Christians should have subcultures, too, but rather, their usual execution. However, Risen does what it wants, and fulfills its own goal not only with biblical truth but with creative excellence.

Much of the time I was sitting in the theater gripped by emotion. I felt this way partly because of my personal connection to my Savior’s resurrection. Yet I was also thinking, “This is good. This is actually good. Will it stop being good? No, it’s actually staying good.”

Finally, I put away that childish thought. I found myself caught up in a simply told story based on the Story that transcends our comparatively small debates over “Christian” movies and how brilliant/terrible they are. This story subverts all that just by setting about its job: exploring one (fictional) human person’s response to the results of the resurrected Christ.

Read the rest at Christ and Pop Culture, then feel free to return for these bonus thoughts:

Risen is fantastical and realistic

In my review I didn’t want to spoil the surprises of Risen. These moments show the power of God miraculously breaking into reality. Sometimes they are almost so careful that you miss them, but the results are undeniably miraculous.

However, the film only does this by first showing us “earthly things” we can believe:

• Our hero, Clavius, is empathetic, competent, flawed, sinful, and real;
• People he meets resemble universal human traits—familiar, yet transcendent;
• The story-world is believable and gritty, though not “grit” for its own sake.

Risen explores Bible themes other ‘Christian movies’ can’t or won’t

Risen succeeds partly by ignoring other Christian movies and avoiding any of their tropes. At first this is easy because the film attempts a genre Christians have enjoyed for years—biblical fiction. But this genre has been crowded aside by two more popular genres: straight-up Bible adaptations and contemporary morality/miracle dramas.

Most of the morality/miracle dramas seem to attempt the reverse formula of Risen. They show us heroes, other people, and story-worlds that already seem miraculous. Then they try to bring in the miracles. It ends up tasting like too much dessert before dinner.

But because we quietly do not believe when these stories tell us “earthly things,” we find it even harder to believe when these stories try to tell us “heavenly things.”

Risen also works better than contemporary morality/miracle stories because it’s set in a world entirely unlike our own. A biblical fiction, tinged with “miraculous realism,” lets us forget about our own realities or projections of ideal reality (in which we are all middle-class American families just a prayer or spiritual program away from plot resolution).

Instead of thinking about the movie’s effect on non-Christian people or ourselves¹, the story asks us to look at Clavius. He is a living, thinking person (portrayed by Joseph Fiennes). He has hopes and struggles and sins as we do. But as we explore his story, we’re not thinking about us. At first we’re not even thinking about the fact that This Is a Bible Story, So It Had Best Get it Right. We are thinking about Clavius, stepping outside ourselves, engaging his journey.

Great stories whose people and worlds help us forget ourselves also help teach us humility. But no one learns humility by watching moving pictures that are like himself.

Risen sticks to the Bible; do some Christians prefer otherwise?

No Christian critics I read faulted Risen for inserting fictitious characters Clavius (Joseph Fiennes) and Lucius (Tom Felton) into the story. So we are getting better!

Some biblical Christians have faulted Risen for unbiblical reasons:

• The story portrays the apostles as fearful, uncertain, and even naïve;
• The story does not present the complete gospel of repentance and faith in Jesus;
• The story does not explore full doctrinal implications of Jesus’s death and resurrection.²

Each of these objections is based on a few flawed assumptions:

1. That the movie was meant to tell the whole Gospel story, rather than Clavius’s story;
2. That the movie should have shown spiritually mature apostles, rather than portrayals that are surely closer to their actual state at the time (immature, naïve, reckless);
3. That the movie should have gone beyond the actual resurrection account, rather than sticking close to the narrative that itself does not explain the whys of Jesus’ resurrection.

Many of these objections can be answered by exploring the highest purpose of stories. We should not expect stories first to evangelize, entertain, or morally edify us. Instead a story should first move us to glorify God. Thus, after we see a movie, what should we first want to do? I suggest we ought not first want to do anything, if by “do” we mean a moral action. Instead we ought first to be moved to thank God for this good gift through human culture.

That’s how I felt after I saw Risen, and that’s why I highly recommend you see this quiet little biblical fiction drama very soon.

To steal the evangelical movie “support zombie” rhetoric, if you pay to see this film, and truly enjoy it, then we will more likely get movies like this. And that way the genre(s) of Christian movies—which must start somewhere, so I’m not knocking them all—will be more likely able to mature.