Catholic Review of: The Apostle Paul and the Earliest Churches

I have to say that I was pretty disappointed in the documentary Apostle Paul and the Earliest Churches.  I really wanted to like this movie, but I just couldn't.  The cinamotography leaves much to be desired.  With an abundance of camera pans and weird angels, it was sometimes hard to tell what I was supposed to be looking at.  And while the film boasts of 3D animated maps of the places St. Paul visited, they are presented in a hard to follow manner. 

 

The documentary is very factual, but the retelling of Paul's travels in it is boring.  It begins with the conversion of Paul and follows him through his travels through Anatolia or Turkey.  Though this is a subject I tend to be very interested in, I could not get into it.  The documentary is only 48 minutes long, but I found myself bored and never actually finished it. 

 

I think in the short amount of time the filmmakers had, they tried to do way too much. The movie description states that this documentary is meant to show "[t]he historical, religious, and archaeological backround of each Anatolian region...[the] reenactment of the miracles Paul performed, the difficulties Paul encountered, and the persecution Paul faced...Significant artifacts from a variety of Turkish museums are also discussed." While all these things are breifly looked at, the documentary rushes through them so fast the viewer is unable to really appreciate (or understand) what they are being presented with.

 

My recommendation to the producers would be that they should have given the cameraman less freedom to confuse the eye, and spent more time on the script, while narrowing down the topics.  I would not recommend this movie.