She said they were composed of straps covered with iron hooks or chains, which penetrated to the bone while tearing off large pieces of flesh whenever he was struck with a blow. Looking back at Gibson’s past, some people think it was just violence after his DUI arrest. But if you look at his films whether before or after The Passion of the Christ, there is a lot of violence in his movies like Braveheart or Apocalypto. In the interviews he had about The Passion, he mentioned that the purpose of the violence is not simply just to make the film violent, but the real reason behind it is to make it realistic. For example, the first part of the film, which takes place in the dark forest at night (shot by the superb cinematographer Caleb Deschanel), feels like a thriller/horror movie. As Christ is praying in the garden, the camera goes around him as if there was a stalker behind him. The cinematographer, John Debney, manages to score a very high-toned creep show with threatening orchestral undertones and choral effects. We see a snake-like, slithery Satan, who is played by an Italian woman called Rosalinda Celentano, who moves in a smooth, sneaky way towards …show more content…
Immediately after the release of the movie, he was already being criticized to how much he made the film obsessed with just the physical torture and the execution of Jesus. But many priests came to defend Gibson by saying that the blood and gore were acceptable, and that people needed to really see realistic depiction of Christ’s death. When we look at Christ movies that were made before Mel Gibson’s, we see that The Passion was not the only film that was bloodier and more realistic than others. For example, in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, the same thing situation occurred where people said it was too violent and priests ended up defending the movie because it was trying to be more realistic. Also, we live in a culture that is filed with goriness and violent movies, where many of them won Academy awards and have great box office success. What is funny is that Gibson himself was the one who helped begin this trend twenty-two years ago with his epic movie Braveheart. After it was released in 1995, Hollywood made several extremely graphic war movies like Gladiator and Saving Private