Last night, NBC brought to a conclusion its 6-episode mini-series, Revelations. About two months ago before the first episode aired, it was billed as an effort of the entertainment industry to "take religion seriously."
Well, if at first you don't succeed . . .
Actually, let me put it this way: if this is taking religion seriously, I'd rather they go back to mocking religion.
Why the strong reaction? They took the Roman Catholic Church and painted it over in a Zoroastrian dualism. There was just the weird "second incarnation" of the Christ. A nun advocated active euthanasia. Okay, that was, sadly, true to life. But still not real Catholicism. There was no mention of the actual Jesus (you know, the one the Church believes in), no mention of the crucifixion, the resurrection or the Trinity. This was dualism with "Jesus terms" shoehorned in. The Manichean Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins.
This is not taking religion seriously. This is prostituting Christianity for a buck.
First of all, Christianity didn't need the heresy-spewing "Left Behind" series anyway. (Start with chiliasm, rejected in the Nicene Creed, and go from there.) It surely didn't need an ancient Persian religion remade with nominally Christian vocabulary.
In point of fact, there is no war of a good God versus an evil Satan. The war is over. Jesus won. Say about 2000 years ago.
Aside from that, the series was just badly written. There was no significant motivation for any of the characters. The only ones who had any recognizable motivation were mere cardboard cutouts: the rebel nun euthanasing a young girl, the other rebel nun seeking true experiences of God outside the institutional Church, the agnostic professor who goes through an emotional crisis and comes to faith, the really evil bad guy who inexplicably picks on the hero and his family. Then there's the just cringeworthy: An explosion with a huge fireball that doesn't kill all the people in the room where the explosion emanates from; the incredibly strong really evil bad guy who can't bleed, but apparently can be hurt really bad by a knife thrust; the raped woman who gives birth to a goat which gives birth to a little baby we're to assume is the antichrist (at least I think that's what happened).
I think I'm more mad at myself for the waste of six hours of my life on utter crap. I watch almost no TV at all (occasional "Law & Order" episodes, all franchises; sometimes "Lost" with my wife who loves that series). That the majority of the TV watching I've done in the last two months was on this . . . *sigh*!
There's a hint this is going to be turned into a regular series. Let's get it on the prayer chain that this won't see any more of the light of day.
Posted by Clifton at May 19, 2005 09:37 AM | TrackBack