Ben-Hur ‘Tale of the Christ’ or tale of Rome? : (My thoughts on the paper and thoughts on the movie after reading the paper)

In this article I learned that maybe I should not have skipped the overture for Ben-Hur.  If I had left the overture and waited like the people at that time would have done would my opinion of the movie be different? I did listen to half of the overture until I decided that if I wanted to get through the entire that night I would have to skip the rest of the overture and get started.  In my opinion, I think that by listening to just a minute or half of the overture, is enough time to get into the mindset that you are watching something bigger than just a film.  I feel that if some of the scenes could have been made shorter and left the chariot race the way that it is, maybe the chariot race would of stood out a lot more.  As for the presence of Jesus throughout the film, there were times where I thought that the movie was trying to make Judah a little bit like if he was going through something somewhat similar to what Jesus was going through.  Judah was judged unjustly and was condemned for something that he did not do, while Jesus was also condemned for the sins of everyone.  Also when Messala says, “He is god the only god. He is power, real power on earth Not –that” it made me think to a scene in Titanic when someone, I cannot remember who said that not even God could sink the ship, and what happens the Titanic sinks.  So in this particular case I see a similarity with a defiance of God Messala says that God does not have any power on earth and what happens? Messala is killed very brutally during the chariot race.  When I try to put myself in the position of the people of 1959 I can imagine that seeing a film on a big screen with so many vibrant colors and such a big action sequence I know that if I would have lived in that time era I would have been very impressed and even now that I am so much more used to color film and SGI and so many other “movie magic” I found myself liking the 1959 version of Ben-Hur and reading this paper by Theodorakopoulos really put a lot of things about this film into perspective and I know that if I were to watch this movie again I would probably enjoy it a lot more