Ready for Gibson’s “Acid Trip” Resurrection?

"So many “Jesus movies” fall prey to a tepid trend of sentimentalism, being too safe to be significant." Like "Chosen" and "The Last Supper".

From Crisis

By  Sean Fitzpatrick

Two decades on, in the fullness of time, Gibson's sequel to his magnum opus is set to begin filming this summer. No one knows if it will meet the high standard set with the original. Oremus!  

After two decades of speculation following Mel Gibson’s groundbreaking The Passion of the Christ, it’s finally official: a sequel will begin shooting this summer in Italy. Like the first film, The Resurrection of the Christ will seek to challenge audiences as a wild work of cinema in a world (and a Church) growing devoid of anything like bold originality in art.

Rome’s Cinecittà Studios confirmed the upcoming shoot of Gibson’s second biblical epic to stoke the fervor achieved by his 2004 runaway hit. With Jim Caviezel as Jesus Christ, The Passion made $612 million worldwide against its $30 million budget (which Gibson largely self-financed).

While The Passion presented the final twelve hours of Jesus’ life in potent and painful detail, The Resurrection will reportedly explore what happened in the three days before Easter Sunday, including the harrowing of Hell, the war of the angels, and other apocalyptic sequences.

Doubting-Thomas moviegoers will have to see it to believe it, as it all sounds pretty controversial. But controversy is the legacy of The Passion, acclaimed as it is by Christians and Catholics and even serving as a Holy Week staple for many. The difficulty of the film lies mostly in its graphic violence, as it does not shy away from the explicit details of Jesus’ torturous suffering and death—while secular audiences questioned and criticized Gibson’s portrayal of the Jews.

“There was a lot of opposition to it,” Gibson recalled, knowing what Hollywood millstones feel like. “I think if you ever hit on this subject matter, you’re going to get people going.” With an artistic reputation for brutal violence and a personal reputation for boorish comments, Gibson may be guilty as charged, but his reverence for the subject matter of The Passion is clear even if his treatment is arguable.

“It’s a big subject matter,” Gibson has said about The Passion, 

and my contention was, when I was making it, it was like, you’re making this film, and the idea was that we’re all responsible for this, that His sacrifice was for all mankind, and for all our ills and all the things in our fallen nature. It was a redemption.

Well said by an artist who knows what he is about. A film about Jesus Christ should strive to be sacred art, that is, a work of art that is used in a public or private context for evangelization, contemplation, or education in the Faith. A film can do this if done boldly, as Gibson demonstrates, and many—if not all—have fallen short of the mark he hit. 

The Last Supper, in theaters now, doesn’t make anything new as any true creative act does, and as such it fails in a central artistic purpose, with a Messiah played by Jamie Ward that is too straightforward to be stirring. It doesn’t take the risk of Gibson’s quivering Christ in shredded skin. There’s Jonathan Roumie’s surfer-bro Messiah in The Chosen, also in theaters, which borders on the tacky in its desire to appeal and doesn’t go far enough with the conundrums of the God Man. Then there are those that go too far, with heretical blasphemies like Willem Dafoe’s Jesus being tempted by Mary Magdalene in Martin Scorsese’s 1988 drama The Last Temptation of Christ. 

These treatments aren’t as successful as Gibson’s feature because they are not as artistically meaningful—they don’t take on as much as the subject demands. Meaningfulness comes with calculated risk, as all worthy things do, and that risk lies in an honesty which is often dangerous, especially when it comes to depicting the mysteries of faith. 

So many “Jesus movies” fall prey to a tepid trend of sentimentalism, being too safe to be significant. It is not so much dangerous as it is damaging, and this schmaltziness poses a central problem in sacred art today. Despite decent production values and pure intentions, films like The Last Supper may not be egregiously offensive against the Catholic call to produce high artistic representations of the highest artistic material, but they never reach the height of what has already been produced by Gibson. 

It may not be fair to compare shows like The Chosen or films like The Last Supper so directly with the record-shattering triumph and ongoing legacy of The Passion, but it is a natural critical inclination. Considering films on their own merits is possible, but it is impossible to avoid acknowledging that the bar is high. The Passion is a powerful film, and it’s good that this story of stories has been given strong treatment, demanding that artists rise to new occasions in taking on this narrative which deserves and demands retelling.

Gibson himself now returns to the story to challenge his own accomplishment. Eyeing a 2026 release, The Resurrection of the Christ appears to promise even more than its predecessor, with a daring premise that doubles down on the risk factor and hence the potential art factor. How Gibson plans to capture the spiritual events that took place between Christ’s death and Resurrection can only be imagined. In his recent interview on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Gibson called the project an “acid trip” that will deal with “some crazy stuff.”

Gibson has been working over a script for seven years with his brother Donal Gibson and Braveheart screenwriter Randall Wallace. His cryptic comments about it include, “I’ve never read anything like it,” that the story is “not linear” and has to “juxtapose the event itself against everything else so that it makes some kind of sense in a bigger picture, which is a hard thing to do.” 

Gibson also suggested that he isn’t sure if he will use ancient dialects as he did in the first film so effectively (also in Apocalypto), saying, “I don’t know that you can do it in a foreign language because the concepts are too difficult now.” What those concepts are has yet to be revealed, but these teasers are intriguing.

Staying on brand, it doesn’t seem that Gibson is holding back. “I think in order to really tell the story properly you have to really start with the fall of the angels,” he said to Rogan, “which means you’re in another place, you’re in another realm. You need to go to hell. You need to go to Sheol.” If anyone is crazy enough to go to such places, it’s Mel Gibson.

I’m going to try and tackle this question: that there are big realms, spiritual realms. There’s good, there’s evil, and they are slugging it out for the souls of mankind. And my question is, “Why are we even important, little old flawed humanity? Why are we important in that process where the big realms are slugging it out over us?” And I think there’s bigger things at play here, and institutions that purport to touch on the divine are necessarily going to be affected by that slugfest that’s going on between good and evil.

In depicting that slugfest, Catholic culture should shepherd people away from harmful art but not dangerous art—and Mel Gibson is a dangerous artist. Given our damaging artistic heritage, with the Church having abandoned patronage of serious sacred artists and the widespread simplifying and sugaring of the supernatural in an effort to isolate it, the renewal of sacred art faces a slugfest of its own. 

That slugfest must be faced and fought, though. When the supernatural is reduced to the saccharine and the streamlined, the supernatural is lost. What remains is meaningless. Contributions like Mel Gibson’s shake things up with a brutal beauty—and it’s a challenge to undertake successfully. Gibson admits,

I’m not sure I can pull it off, but I’m going to take a crack at it… It’s about trying to find a way in that’s not cheesy or obvious… It’s almost like a magic trick… It’s very ambitious and it goes from the fall of the angels to the death of the last apostle.

Art is always ambitious, always risky—and never cheesy or obvious.

After bombing with critics and audiences with Flight Risk this year for not taking enough risk, Mel Gibson is taking on a monumental risk with The Resurrection of the Christ. Catholics might elect not to hold their breath, though, as there is a pathetic pattern playing out by a creatively bankrupt Hollywood of revisiting older properties with golden reputations which collapse under their own legacy. Mel Gibson may fail in attempting to resurrect The Passion, but there is artistic promise in the “acid trip” he is prepared to take.