Agora (2009)
I've been looking forward to this for quite some time because it's the latest film from Alejandro Amenabar, one of my favourite directors. His most well-known movie is, to my mind, his least impressive: "The Others" starring Nicole Kidman. However, if you've seen any of the others in the follow list you will probably understand my excitement: Abre Los Ojos (Open Your Eyes), Mar Adentro (The Sea Inside), Tesis.
The storyline of this movie is inspired by references to the philosopher Hypatia in Carl Sagan's Cosmos and as such the camera will often withdraw not only to show us the extent of Alexandria, but also to show us the entire globe from space. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, Hypatia is often involved in considering what she believes to be the philosophical consequences of the formation of the sun and the planets. Alongside Hypatia's consideration of the matter we are able to see the Earth from a perspective she could only dream of. There's some space for interpretation about the significance of these shots, but for me it shows how inaccessible the truths of the universe were for Hypatia back then, so while the camera allows us to fly up and look for ourselves, Hypatia is left staring at the sky and wondering. The other reason for the shots in space is to show how small and petty the quarrels of human beings are when seen from a cosmic perspective. Carl Sagan would often like to imagine things from a cosmic perspective and Amenabar is trying to give a similar feel here.
Some have seemed a bit mixed up on the inclusion of a library. The introduction points out that the Great Library of Alexandria was a religious centre for pagans as well as a place of learning. The movie then controversially places a smaller library within the pagan temple upon which the story centres. While the destruction of the pagan temple is definitely recorded, the destruction of the library connected to the temple is not. There is some question as to whether Amenabar has become rather overly taken with Sagan's view that the Christians who took over Alexandria connected learning with paganism. Actually Neoplatonism was adopted by Christians due to the influence of St. Augustine. That said, the relationship between Neoplatonism and Christianity wasn't always great and Emperor Justinius I is believed to have closed the Platonic Academy of Athens because he viewed it as having been corrupted by Gnosticism. Leaving that argument aside though, the pagan temple in question, known as the Serapeum, did have a library and it seems a little naive to imagine that when the temple was destroyed the library would somehow be left intact.
Far from showing Christianity in a poor light we see one of Hypatia's slaves converting to the religion and we can see that he has noble reasons for doing so. The appeal that Christian ideology would have for the poor in Alexandria is made very clear. Also, the Christians are not shown as the only ones committing atrocities, but in the long run the support for Christianity in Constantinople means that they are able to get away with more when all groups are in conflict.
When it comes to the brutal attacks, it is interesting to see that while men tend to be the exclusively the ones making the plans, there are always women amongst the victims. In some key scenes we see one of the attack shown in aerial view, making all the participants look like ants, and in another attack we hear the distant screams as the attack goes on as we watch the Earth from space. The Carl Sagan effect. See how well you think it works...
There's a major scene where Cyril, Archbishop of Alexandria, formally offers a Bible to Orestes, the Roman governor. This scene is tied with Orestes friendship with Hypatia rather more than it would have been originally. This is clearly poetic license, since we have limited knowledge of the content of that event (and the movie is certainly accurate on those parts we do know). Personally I think the connection of these two somewhat related elements works very well and after this scene we have one of the most powerful moments in the film, bringing into sharp relief the central message of the dangers of extreme forms of religion.
Sometimes it seems to be suggested that Hypatia is depicted as an atheist in "Agora". Actually that's not technically true. Hypatia, like Socrates, believes in Philosophy. Neither of them followed Christianity (though actually Socrates pre-dates it) and neither of them were followers of their city's particular pagan gods. Socrates was called an atheist for his failure to worship the pagan gods and Hypatia's critics would have been able to label her as such just as easily. However, clearly neither of these figures was an atheist in the sense that we would understand the term today.
There are, however, two aspects of the film which I think detract from it. Firstly, while quite a long film, it is split into two bits. I watched it over two evenings and found myself getting ambushed on both occasions by large amounts of text introducing me to that particular half, just when I was wishing to start my dinner. (Sure, the first time was my own fault, but the second time just felt unfair.) Okay, so the inclusion of text isn't an issue, but I found that the way the movie was broken up didn't help with the pacing. This is a fairly minor complaint.
The bigger issue is the weird racial choices for the actors. The students of Hypatia and the vast majority of the pagans seem to be white Europeans with Oxbridge accents, many of the Christians are depicted as middle eastern. While I can understand that the point is to show Christianity as a rising religion which is for the most part a foreign influence, this religion would have had a long time to grow and would already have many native adherents. Depicting the main proselytisers of Christianity as foreigners felt distinctly unnecessary. While I don't think that the film was proposing an anti-immigration sentiment, I still found this a little dodgy. (Some have suggested a comparison between the Christians of 4th Century Alexandria and Muslims in Europe today, but I find that link rather tenuous.) As much as I'd like to hand-wave this issue, in the end I think it is sufficiently offputting to warrant a slightly lower score.
Agora is a beautiful movie with a very powerful message. It's a little long and the way it's split into two halves feels a bit clunky. However, the scenes of the Earth from space in a costume drama are an original and effective touch and the movie is very emotionally and visually engaging from beginning to end. Rachel Weisz is brilliant in the leading role (as one would expect) though I'm not sure that her very level-headed character gives her as much scope to showcase her acting talent as other roles have done in the past. In spite of a rather poorly-judged depiction of race for reasons I find hard to fathom, the movie still has a number of worthwhile points to bring to our attention and in spite of criticism of its historical accuracy, it seems to be rather more accurate than we would normally expect from costume dramas.
4.5/5