The Last Temptation of Christ / YMMV

Accidental Aesop: The irony of Jesus building crosses for the Romans is not lost upon critics of American capitalism: like the modern American worker, Jesus feeds the industrial juggernaut that eventually kills him.
Alternative Character Interpretation: Christian viewers may interpret the artistic license taken with the characters differently, in terms of being acceptable or blasphemous or heretical, which will depend on what exactly they believe (again for context: the author of the novel had an Orthodox background; while the director and screenwriter have Catholic and Protestant ones, respectively), and this inevitably leads to a Broken Base.
Award Snub: Martin Scorsese's Academy Award nomination for Best Director was the only nomination it receieved.
Awesome Music: By none other than Peter Gabriel, particularly the music during the Palm Sunday scene where Jesus and his disciples enter Jerusalem.
Fridge Brilliance: The encounter between Paul and Jesus in the temptation scene. The real-life St. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15:14 that without the risen Christ, all faith and preaching are in vain. Had Christ fallen to the last temptation, he would not have died on the cross and would not have risen from the dead. If so, Paul's future preaching, if it still took place, would have been a lie. Christ's crucifixion nullifies this by ensuring that there will be the resurrection and renders Paul's future preaching true. Doubles as a sort of Stable Time Loop.
Harsher in Hindsight: A film about Jesus starring David Bowie and features in addition a depiction of the Lazarus resurrection. Come 2015–2016, the release of ★ and the single "Lazarus" (followed by a stage show and music video), with Bowie dying just two days after the former's release.
Heartwarming Moments: Jesus and Judas's friendship (after the opening scene, at least) is rather touching, since Judas is nearly the only person who provides Jesus with emotional support. The scene of them sleeping under the tree stands out in this respect.
He Really Can Act: For those who only associate David Bowie as an actor with the sensual, increasingly-unhinged Thomas Jerome Newton or the campily villainous Jareth, seeing him deliver a subdued, dignified performance as Pontius Pilate can come off as this.
Magnificent Bastard: Satan, the Archangel, is a manipulative entity conspiring to prevent Jesus Christ's sacrifice and plunge mankind into eternal damnation. Quietly observing Christ throughout his life, Satan attempts to appeal to Christ's human nature by offering him power and a chance at a normal life. When Christ is crucified, Satan takes the form of an angel and removes him from the cross after claiming that he wasn't truly the Messiah. Convincing Christ to marry Mary Magdalene as well as to pursue other women when she abruptly dies, Satan nearly succeeds at dismantling God's divine plan as the elderly Christ approached death.
Moment of Awesome: "It is accomplished!"
Narm: Harvey Keitel and his Brooklyn accent.
No Such Thing as Bad Publicity: The film's modern-day reception.
- Played straight for Martin Scorsese himself, as the controversy made him a household name and did more than anything else to re-ignite his career, and also played straight when the novel was first published: the Greek Orthodox Church tried to block publication, which led to a huge argument between religious and secular voices that ended with the Greek parliament passing a specific resolution protecting the book. As a result of all the controversy, it became's Greece's best-selling book of 1955.
- Subverted in regards to how the film actually went down among contemporary audiences. The film barely broke even financially ($8 million box office on a $7 million budget)^note, and pundits made more money decrying the film on talk shows than Scorsese earned by making it. The box-office failure and the strong reaction it provoked, including antisemitic outbursts (fundamentalists burnt crosses on producer Lew Wassermann's lawn — despite Wassermann was Jewish), made the film industry skeptical of bible films and religious subjects in general. Massive letter-writing and boycott campaigns from various religious groups, most notably the Catholic League (who encouraged Catholics to never set foot into any theater which showed the film ever again), also didn't help the film's box office. To this day, the film is still highly controversial in the conservatively Christian (by Western standards) United States and is outright banned in Singapore and The Philippines.
- Also subverted in ironic fashion by one of the lead protesters, Campus Crusade for Christ founder and president Dr. Bill Bright. The protesters had actually won some of the early publicity battles in the fight over the film, but then Bright offered Universal $10 million to hand over all copies of the film's negative so he could presumably destroy them. This made the protesters look like overzealous Culture Police and gave Universal a huge opening to defend the film on civil liberties grounds, which they seized dramatically.
Offending the Creator's Own: Scorsese had a Catholic upbringing and initially wanted to be a priest, and although he lapsed out of the Church on account of his sympathies with the Vietnam War protest movements, by the time of the '80s, he still identified himself as being religious. His idea of doing a non-traditional Christ movie was mostly to show that Jesus' central message, stripped of its traditional iconography and presentation, was still relevant and positive. The massive outcry in highly Christian parts of the world, especially the US (albeit mostly from Evangelicals rather than mainline Catholics or Protestants), nonetheless compounded the still-lingering controversy surrounding the portrayal of Biblical settings in Monty Python's Life of Brian from nearly a decade earlier and resulted in the near-instantaneous formation of a still-standing stigma against any non-traditional approach to religious subjects in mainstream movies.
One True Threesome: Jesus is implied to become one of these during the alternate future when, following Mary Magdalene's death, he ends up living with Mary and Martha, the sisters of Lazarus, and having many children with both of them. It is justified because Jews were occasionally polygamous back then.
Periphery Demographic: It has received praise from many non-Christian viewers for presenting an interpretation of Jesus that doesn't lionize him as an Incorruptible Pure Pureness figure, instead opting to show him as a man with flaws, fears, and doubts, which managed to endear him more to non-Christian audiences.
Questionable Casting:
- Willem Dafoe — known for taking dark, psychotic roles and looking generally Satanic — plays Jesus. Scorsese justified this on grounds of averting Jesus Was Way Cool, wanting a Jesus who wasn't immediately charismatic and obvious in his message but someone who grew into his role and an actor who illustrated the conflict between being fully human and divine. Sergio Leone, at least, did not take it well, and had this to say, according to Dafoe:
  "That is the face of a murderer, not of Our Lord!"
- David Bowie as Pontius Pilate raises most people's eyebrows, but Bowie then turns in the most subtle performance of the film, portraying Pilate as intelligent, polite and yet quite cold and pragmatic. Of course, this is David Bowie we're talking about (the fact that Jareth the Goblin King near-completely overwrote all previous perceptions of Bowie's merits as an actor probably factored into the perception of his casting as Pilate as being somewhat left-field).
- Harry Dean Stanton as Saul/Paul seems odd, until you see that Paul is something of a villain in this story.
Slow-Paced Beginning: The first half hour kind of drags. It's a bit talky, there's some heavy symbolism, and presenting us with a couple major variations on the gospel account up front (Jesus making crosses for the Romans and Jesus already knowing Judas and Mary Magdalene) makes us unsure which direction the film is headed. But once we get to "cast the first stone" and John the Baptist we're back on familiar narrative turf and we start to appreciate what Scorsese is doing.
Vindicated by History:
- Decades later, some hard-right fundamentalist Christian sects of all people, like The Promise Keepers, would eventually agree that the infamous temptation in the film would be precisely the kind of trickery that Satan would try on Jesus. Despite this, the film is still controversial in fundamentalist circles, so much so that many refused to see the very unprovocative Silence solely because it was directed by the same guy who directed Last Temptation, choosing instead to support Hacksaw Ridge, likely because despite the similar religious views and very controversial personal life of that film's director, he also did The Passion of the Christ, which is worshipped and beloved by many of these same evangelicals and fundamentalists.
- The movie is also regarded as one of Scorsese's most striking films, and it's admired by Abel Ferrara, Steve Erickson, and Christian theologian Robert Price. Price went as far as to call the film a 20th-century Gospel for the modern age, one that offers a vision of Jesus familiar to people without the trappings and baggage of organized religion.
- Likewise, it's not hard to find at least one young Christian who loves the movie because the more humanistic depiction of Jesus reminds them of a struggle that they themselves went through, and challenges with their faith. This depiction of Jesus of a flawed human being as capable of human error as anyone else, even at his most divine, clearly spoke to plenty of Christians struggling with their faith, with their emotions and depression, and that such a depiction of their prophet was validating to them and that it mirrored what they went through. The same also find Jesus' death more triumphant as a result, even if it's fictional.

YMMV / The Last Temptation of Christ

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