Agora

I came into this film knowing very little about it. All I knew was that it had Rachel Weisz as an astronomer in Alexandria dealing with the politics of the day. It looked like a solid drama so I went and saw it. I should've known it was a bad sign when before the movie even begins they put up the Cannes logo...along with "screened out of competition." So instead of a tight drama what I got was Rachel Weisz whining "I wish I could figure out how the planets move around the sun!" for two hours while Christians get angry first with the pagans and then with the Jews and kill lots and lots of people.

Anyways, to the movie. Weisz is indeed an astronomer in Alexandria in the 4th century, working as a philosopher/teacher to a bunch of young men. One of her students, Orestes, is madly in love with her despite her indifference to love. The rest of her students completely adore her, and one of her slaves is madly in love with her too. She teaches them about how it's possible that the Earth isn't the center of the universe and the sun is in fact the center, but the theories don't really work because the planets move in circles and that makes the math go wonky.

With their "main" characters introduced the direction quickly shifts towards what is obviously what the director is more interested in: the Christians. The pagans who run Alexandria are facing humiliation at the hands of Christians who perform "miracles" like walking through fire. To teach them a lesson, the pagans decide to kill a bunch of them (including women and children). The Christians get angry, fight back, and the pagans suddenly realize that there are Christians everywhere. They shut themselves up in the library and the Romans come in and halt everything. Post is sent to Constantine (the first Christian emperor) who returns word that the Christians are to be let in to the library. They sack it. Hypatia and Orestes run for it while her slave stays behind because he's been converted during this whole mess.

Fast forward several years. Orestes is now a roman prefect, another of her students is a Christian bishop, and her slave is part of the warrior class of Christians. She still wants to figure out how the planets work. The Jews kill some Christians. The Christians kill a lot more Jews. A radical bishop says the bible says that women shouldn't be teachers. In this critical moment Hypatia discovers by looking at a cone made up of curves that has been in front of her for years that the earth travels in an ellipse around the sun. Orestes goes through EMOTIONAL TURMOIL before betraying Hypatia and giving her to the Christians. Her former slave still loves her and manages through some heavy EMOTIONAL TURMOIL to kill her by suffocating her before she's stoned so it doesn't hurt.

And then to top it all off, that whole "this is a true story thing" is hilariously spoiled at the end when the "this is what happened to the characters after the movie ends" titles reveal that none of Hypatia's works survived and all that's known about her is she worked with curves or somesuch, meaning that pretty much the "true story" you just witnessed was MADE UP. Yes, the library was sacked by Christians, and Hypatia did exist, but that whole character arc she had about discovering the true motion of the planets hundreds of years before anyone else is actually completely worthless because it didn't happen.

It was all just so BORING. The characters were completely one-dimensional despite the best efforts of the actors involved, the tirade against how Christians are bad and don't follow what the Bible says, and the attempt to relate it to modern day, is extremely blatant, the forced EMOTIONAL TURMOIL from damn near everyone is a classic example of shoving something in your face and saying "SEE ISN'T THIS SAD?" instead of making it actually sad, and the story itself is just so damn inconsequential that there's never any reason to care about what's going on besides the casual interest one might get from watching a random documentary on the History Channel.

The film just felt like the director constantly waddled between focusing on what he felt was the boring but necessary story of Hypatia and the story he really wanted to tell about the big battles between Christians and everyone else. And even then it was just a bunch of angry people running around stabbing each other and random gore, without any sense of drama like most any other movie with battles.

In short, there's just very little reason to care about anything in this movie. It tries so hard to be meaningful and dramatic (oh, I forgot to mention all the ISN'T THIS MEANINGFUL shots of the earth among the stars) that it ends up just being boring. So unless you want a brief, only slightly accurate portrayal of what was going on in 4th century Egypt, there's little need to see this movie.

Agora gets a 4.5/10.