Ben Hur
The movie In the Name of Ben-Hur has been described by some as a “mockbuster”. It is a cheap production released on DVD and aimed at the market created by a similar and more popular film that was on theaters at the time.
Such movies are made by The Asylum, the production company that financed Ben Hur, among others. One of their earliest breakthroughs was producing a cinematic interpretation of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, released in 2005 alongside a high-budget version directed by Steven Spielberg. Ever since they have been making movies titled Transmorphers, The Day the Earth Stopped and similar films.
Thus, when Timur Bekmambetov made the large scale remake of Ben-Hur about four years ago, The Asylum made sure that they had their version as well. Instead of focusing on making a competing film based on Lew Wallace’s novel, they created a type of sequel to his book, and this time, they paid attention to one or two inconsistencies in the novel which every other movie disregarded.
All the other previously existing versions of Ben-Hur have, more or less, come to the conclusion that Jesus has died and Judah Ben-Hur has either embraced Christianity or joined some sort of Christian/peace loving sect. In other words, the character is in a metaphysical state of some sort. What is interesting is that the first book of the trilogy actually ended with Judah being in Rome at sometime around in the third book, using his riches to assist the Christians who were being any pianistic Neronian persecution that began in AD 64.
Miraculously, in the name of ben hur depicts this very rarely expressed seam of the novel. The events are set during the Roman Empire in the times of Nero and we learn that by the time Israel fights the Romans, Judah has relocated to Lusitania for unknown reasons. We learn that while in Lusitania, Judah fought with the catacomb Christians. In simpler terms, this story takes place after the events of the epilogue of Wallace’s novel, but before the death of Nero in AD 68.
Presumably, The Asylum set the story in this time and place partly because of cost constraints; they could not afford the sea battle or the chariot race as found in many adaptations of Ben Hur and thus had to find a more broad narrative, one that would be restricted to minor battles in a forest or a few chase scenes on a beach. Furthermore, by moving the religious part of the plot to quite a different timeframe, they managed to bypass the main problems about the book which is related to religion.
Certainly, the fact that this film is set in the year, it should follow that by now Judah should be around sixty years of age. However, he does appear to be younger than that. (His character’s actor, Adrian Bouchet, was born in 1972; when the proposed film was released, he was just 44 years old.)
The chronology in the movie is elastic in other aspects as well: one Roman army fighting female warrior claims that she participated in the Teutoburg Forest battles, a significant event for the Romans which took place in 9AD. This was more than 50 years in the past of the movie, and she does not appear to be anywhere near old enough to have participated then.
It also evokes memories of how The Last Days of Pompeii released in 1935 had Pontius Pilate going to Pompeii just before the volcano erupted and drove that city into the pages of history in 79 AD, about fifty years after Pilate had Jesus killed. But then, at least it is still in the first century! Everything that happened back then happened in the same time scale or more or less the same timeline, right?
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