And a lot of philosophizing in the dialogue. Hence, this “Ben-Hur” has more Christ in it than any previous version.
Wallace’s novel was subtitled “A Tale of the Christ” and this movie was produced by Mark Burnett and Roma Downey, who’ve parlayed Burnett’s success with reality television into a shingle devoted to making movies with pronounced Christian content. It’s a bit of a one-set-of-footsteps moment that has a big payoff later on. But fear not, the scene is just a preview, and we flashback, after a few expositional points in narration from Morgan Freeman (who, fear not, is also a character in the picture), to Judah Ben-Hur’s noble household in Jerusalem eight years before, and see Judah and his Roman adopted brother Messala (note the slight change in relations) riding horses together carefree, until an accident places Judah in the care of his friend. Talk about beginning on a high note-the chariot race of the William Wyler-directed 1959 film, starring Charlton Heston and Stephen Boyd, is that movie’s climax. This version of the strange novel concocted by Union Army General Lew Wallace in 1880 (a warrior’s apologia for Christianity that surpassed 1852’s previous record holder “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” on the best-seller lists) begins as Judah Ben-Hur (a steely Jack Huston) and his onetime friend Messala ( Toby Kebbell) are facing off in a chariot race. The briskness was but one reason I found this quasi-Biblical epic strangely refreshing. This movie, on the other hand, gets the job done in pretty much exactly two hours. The silent version was about two hours and twenty minutes, no marathon but still longer than average for its time.
The celebrated 1959 version of the saga, once the most-Oscar-winning-picture-of-all-time, clocked in at almost four hours. Clarke and John Ridley, is a masterpiece of condensation. If nothing else, “Ben-Hur,” directed by Timur Bekmambetov from a script by Keith R.