This Italian film from the mid-nineties took kind of a strange path to get to America. I’m not sure how it happened, but this appears to be a free-standing film that was actually made and released in theaters in Italy and then it got optioned for television as part of a whole Bible miniseries thing that was being done here in America under the funding of Ted Turner. The first one of those miniseries was about Abraham, so this probably seemed like a nice way to cover everything up to that point in Genesis. Those miniseries have their pros and cons, but this movie doesn’t really feel of a piece with them. I enjoyed some things about this movie. It has some beautiful nature footage for one thing; it also frames the stories of the creation, the garden of Eden, Cain & Abel and the Flood as stories being told by a Bedouin elder to his grandchildren and I liked that as well. Most of the performers appear to be non-professionals from the region; this has pros and cons – there’s just authenticity to the faces and that adds to the atmosphere, but when they’re called on to actually act, most of them are pretty flat. The film is also pretty . . . mystical, I guess. It’s more interested in capturing a mystical vibe than feeling grounded in history or exploring the characters and that was interesting. It’s not entirely successful at that, unfortunately, so at times it does feel very poetic and beautiful and at other times, like during the entire Noah’s Ark section, it’s just grindingly dull. I enjoyed the Cain & Abel section the most but for the most part, even at under two hours, this feels very long and dull. As Biblical movies go, this isn’t one of the better ones. 2 stars.
tl;dr – Italian film goes for a mystical atmosphere, but only achieves it sporadically; as Biblical films go, this just isn’t one of the better ones. 2 stars.