After
watching Sign of the Cross, I had
mixed emotions about the movie. I liked the storyline of the movie how there
were these two people from different “worlds” that saw each other and fell in love.
I like how it wasn’t completely love at first sight for Mercia and it took her
a while to fully fall in love or get to know Marcus. I really liked the
character of Mercia because she wouldn’t just change to please people but stood
strong in what she believed (Christianity) and even when it meant that she
could live if only she denounced her faith, she didn’t and didn’t want any
special treatment. I thought it was
interesting how for most of the movie Marcus was trying to “pressure” Mercia
into leaving her religion and having her to be content with just him and not
her religion but in the end the movie he accepted who she was and even accepted
her faith if it meant that he could be with her in the afterlife. One of the
things I didn’t enjoy about the movie was the ending about how everyone died,
even the main protagonists but I feel that it was necessary in order to get the
point across that punishing of Christians did happen and not everything had a
happy ending.
I agree with you about the sad but necessary ending. It made the movie far more realistic and had more of an impact than if the Christians were pardoned. It's highly unlikely they would've escaped persecution anyway in Ancient Rome after getting blamed for the Great Fire. That was pretty much their death knell.
ReplyDeleteAs you'll see in "Quo Vadis" (1951), which is basically a remake of "Sign of the Cross", movie audiences do have a strong desire for a happy ending. So when Lydia (the Mercia character in "Quo Vadis") survives the deadly challenge that Poppaea has devised for her, there is a general uprising that ends in Nero's overthrow. This clearly is speeding up history by four years, but who cares, at least the lovers get to have each other and there's an emotionally more satisfying happy ending.
ReplyDelete"Gladiator" (2000) similarly offers a happy ending, although one could call it more mixed: the bad emperor Commodus gets killed, democracy is restored, but Maximus the gladiator dies as well, even though that means he can rejoin his family, who had been killed by command of the emperor, in the afterlife.
^^ SPOILER ALERTS ^^
ReplyDelete