Paul the Apostle Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		1.5
Video		1.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		1.5

Paul the Apostle Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman February 6, 2017

Note: This film is available as part of the box set The Bible Stories Collection.

That oft quoted adage “the book was better” might never be more appropriate than in adaptations culled from the Bible. How can mere mortals hope to compete with what many believe is a Divinely inspired collection of writings? That of course hasn’t stopped a lot of mere mortals from trying, and Biblical stories have been a staple of first film and, later, television outings virtually from the time these media were invented. While the big screen Biblical epics of the 1950s and 1960s were often kind of silly ( David and Bathsheba), or alternatively overly reverential and therefore kind of stodgy (The Greatest Story Ever Told), they typically (though not always) brought audiences in to delight not just in the pomp and circumstance, but also perhaps to blandish any qualms of conscience that not going to church and/or shul “religiously” (so to speak) may have engendered. One of the more interesting films to come out of this adaptive fervor was the 1966 effort The Bible: In the Beginning..., a John Huston directed effort which presented several iconic tales from Genesis and which was initially planned as just the first installment for a whole series of Biblically oriented tales culled directly from scripture. Its failure at the box office put the kibosh on that plan, but several decades later, a similar plan was put into production, albeit on a much smaller scale, with a series of made for television films (many marketed as miniseries despite not being all that lengthy) that offered various Bible tales, usually with at least one marquee star attached. Many of the made for television entries included in this set were part of a series which ran on various Ted Turner owned networks starting in the 1990s, and some at least have long been favorites of those who like their Biblical adaptations on the more intimate and less epic side of things.

The Acts of the Apostles is in a way the Paul Harvey-esque “rest of the story” when it comes to the aftermath of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, but this miniseries seems to think that “mere” scripture isn’t good enough source material for a miniseries, and so this Paul the Apostle (evidently released in some markets as St. Paul, as if that made any difference) probably strays the furthest from the Bible in terms of the story it presents. It is in fact almost willfully dismissive of what scripture teaches about Paul, which is especially strange given that so much of the New Testament is either about the apostle or in fact was (purportedly) written by him.

There is just some flat out weird fictionalizing introduced throughout this overlong miniseries, one which purports to tell the story of Saul (Johannes Brandrup), a character who of course undergoes one of the more amazing “conversions” in the entire history of religion, let alone nascent Christianity. But there is so much extraneous and completely ahistorical content added here that it actually deflates what should be the emotional center of the film —Saul “becoming” Paul after his introduction to this “pesky” new religion. Instead, this miniseries often comes off as a little smarmy and almost willfully provocative in terms of its ability to ignore its supposed scriptural basis, including a number of characters invented out of whole cloth and supposed vignettes that I certainly don't ever remember reading about in the Bible.

Paul the Apostle Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

All of the films in The Bible Stories Collection are presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Shout! Factory with AVC encoded 1080p transfers in 1.78:1. While most (perhaps all) of these efforts were broadcast in the United States in 1.33:1, it looks from scouring through the IMDb that many (perhaps all) of them did in fact have theatrical releases in various foreign markets, meaning they were most likely all shot with "safeties" and/or "shoot and protect" regimens in mind. That said, those who have seen the 1.33:1 versions which were released on videotape and DVD will no doubt notice quite a few "tighter" framings, framings which often tend to lop the tops or bottoms off of heads and/or faces, at least intermittently.

It's a little ironic that the newest film in the Bible Stories Collection has by far the worst looking video. This looks like an upscale to my eyes, and one culled from an old, dated and at times pretty problematic master. While brightly lit scenes have at least passable detail, there's a harsh digital appearance to vast swaths of this presentation that looks sharpened to a really ugly degree (take a look at screenshot 19 for one of the worst examples, but if you peruse many of the other screenshots accompanying this review, you'll see others). Colors are generally decent looking, at least in more brightly lit sequences, but clarity is negligible and detail levels often at little better than DVD levels.

Paul the Apostle Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Paul the Apostle features a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track which like many of the others in this set derives the bulk of its surround activity from the score and from discrete channelization of ambient environmental effects. Otherwise, dialogue tends to be anchored firmly front and center, and putting aside a few heavy accents is easy to decipher. As with the other entries in this set, a DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mix is also included.

Paul the Apostle Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

There is no supplementary material of any kind on this Blu-ray disc.

Paul the Apostle Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Though I haven't seen much about it in the interim, in 2015 a high profile film produced by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon and starring Hugh Jackman was announced that was supposedly going to be a biography of St. Paul. The world could use a moving and definitive cinematic portrait of this historically fascinating character. Paul the Apostle is not that film.