Beautiful Words Blog | High Tech Throwback (Review of King of Kings) By Pastor John Moropoulos | Gateway Christian Fellowship

April 17, 2024

So I’ve been asked to dedicate this blog to the new film, King of Kings. It’s a reasonable request given the film’s popularity and the inevitable questions that it gives rise to.

I think it’s helpful to remember that every film version of Bible events has been to some degree controversial. When I was young, the spiritual qualifications of Charlton Heston to play Moses were still being debated. We won’t get into that.

For the record, this is not a critique of the film. That’s not my profession, calling, or interest. Rather, this will consist of a few observations that I made during my one viewing of the film. One viewing means I’m doing this from memory, so I’ve got plausible deniability if I get something wrong.

First, things I observed that didn’t sit well with me (see, there it is, no criticism) just some stuff that “didn’t sit well with me.”

The cat. I’m sorry. It’s probably trivial, but I really struggled with the cat. I’m not a cat person. I’m a dog person, which is why I kept waiting for a first-century street mongrel to solve this problem for me, but that never happened. Seriously, I didn’t like the whole cat thing. Why couldn’t the children have a dog? Besides, if you want to see cats, watch Prince of Egypt. They even had statues of cats.

The ”Charles Dickens morphs into Jesus or vice versa” thing. I could have that backwards. This was clearly a really big moment, and I will confess that it may simply be a matter of my inability to comprehend the complexities involved. But this is a children’s movie. If I can’t figure that whole thing I doubt the children in the audience could. Maybe I’m wrong.

The theology of it. Here I’m serious. The film was weak, at least in my memory of it, on Jesus as the Son of God. I started really looking for it about halfway through. This may be a matter of my expectations being too high. And this is a children’s movie. But as such, it should have offered enough to initiate a discussion about Jesus’ complete identity. I felt it fell short here.

Racism. That’s right. There was a genuine racist element to the film. I don’t remember if every single Roman was a thug, but most of them were pure brutes. A bit more sophistication (see the above comments on Jesus and Dickens swapping identities) would have helped here.

Now, the things I liked, and there are some really good ones.

Character development. Dickens’ son doesn’t “save the day.” His presence has no real impact on the events. He is, for the most part, an observer. That helps us step into the story as well.

Which brings me to the very best part of the movie.

The vehicle used to tell the story was great. Really great. After a diet of modern people falling through holes in time, cars that jump through time (nothing new; the movie Time Machine came out in 1960), and other sci-fi gimmicks, this was a welcome relief. Here we had a father practicing the age-old art of storytelling. Good old-fashioned storytelling, and doing it so well he was able to (with the help of his son’s imagination), move his son back in time. He told the story so well that his son became convinced he was living it at that very moment. The movie never suggests that the boy was back in time, only that he felt that way. The technology of animation helped us to see it. Dickens’ animated character wasn’t the least bit dependent on it.

Finally, and this last comment isn’t fair, because none of us is Charles Dickens, but we can try to become better storytellers. Just think, if we could tell our children the Gospel story so well that they saw themselves in it, what an impact that would have. If we could share our testimony with the conviction that makes it believable to our hearers, we would make a change in people’s lives.

Does King of Kings play fast and loose with the Scriptural accounts? Of course it does. All film versions do. It does, however, give us a vehicle with which to engage people, especially our own children. I think it gets that job done.