History Channel: Bible series

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Anyone else watching this?

They aired their first 2 hours tonight. Its incredibly lossy albeit I can understand why - there's a lot between Genesis and Numbers/Deuteronomy that would slap an X label if played out in full. They'd need hundreds of hours as well to get into all the stories.

So far acting isn't quite as bad as it could have been, special effects are within modern reach. It looks like going forward they're going to dial in on Samson, David, not sure about Solomon, and they'll end it with Jesus before Pilate - probably to avoid the political issue of his resurrection.

It'll be something interesting to watch albeit I'm hoping it won't be too much of a letdown.

On another note there's another specific book of the old testament that always gets looked over in these things - Esther - which, to tell the truth, would be prefect for an entire Guy Ritchie movie just in how the whole thing already has a Lock Stock/Snatch type of plot. It would be cool, if they don't drop the ball on this mini-series, if it opened up a fire-storm of thought as far as further expanding other books and ideas from what's really a treasure trove of movies in the making all depending on what prophet or patriarch they might want to dial in on.

The History channel has been dumbified. I wouldn't waste my time.

I missed the first 45 minutes but watched the rest of it. It is certainly better (in terms of acting and effects) than any of the other Bible-based movies I have seen.

The plot was a little bit dramatized away from what the text says, but I guess that is to be expected. For the most part, I think they did a good job with the story. I wish I had seen the first part; I would have liked to see how they did Noah's story and how they portrayed Hagar and Ishmael.

The foreign language nerd inside of me thinks it would have been better if the actors had spoken Hebrew at least on occasion. I was also sad that in the burning bush scene they left out one of my favorite lines in the Old Testament: "I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: 'I AM has sent me to you.'" (I am fascinated by grammar, so I love thinking about the name 'I AM'.)

They started with Noah telling the Genesis Ch. 1 and 2 story on the ark during a storm while everyone's getting thrown around and getting sick. I had to laugh that Noah had a Braveheart Scottish accent, they did that in at least a few places with different characters which was a little strange. They seemed to portray Ishmael much in the same way they portrayed Isaac, Hagaar was invisible in the plot until Sari made the suggestion she did to Abraham, after Sari/Sara had Isaac they had her acting a bit shifty to convey that Sara had a point in her concerns about the politics of the situation.

I'm a little worried though about the guy they have playing Jesus, ie. they did fine with having many of the cast's ethnicity but I think its another case of them making him too Caucasian/European in countenance.

From what I saw, it was okay but not great (granted, I ended up starting in the middle of Exodus). The portrayal of the pharaoh as overweight rather than a sleek, healthy god-king was pretty realistic, given that what we know about Egyptian kings suggests that they were a bit on the hefty side. Other than that, the actors really should have been Middle Eastern or at least Mediterranean, and they really should have spoken Hebrew/Egyptian. It's the History Channel, after all. I know that they don't show a lot of history any more, but I think that more people would appreciate the authenticity than would be put-off by reading subtitles.

Yeah - sometimes they did that, other times they didn't, and rather strangely they had Egyptian/Semitic/Palestinian looking actors speaking in heavy Scottish Rob Roy accents.

Supposedly Rick Warren sat in as an adviser for the movie. Maybe that's part of the trouble.