Between the ages of 11 and 14, while my classmates were memorising the Fresh Prince theme song and perfecting their Jonathan Taylor Thomas découpage, I had a weird fixation on the 1959 biblical fan-fiction epic Ben-Hur, starring Charlton Heston. My social studies teacher showed it to us during our Ancient Rome unit (I remember her calling Heston “the perfect man” and doing a little sexual shoulder shimmy as if to say “yum yum”). We spent a whole week watching it because, being made in the period before Hollywood figured out how much continuous rowing should go in a movie, Ben-Hur is about three-and-a-half hours long. I was enraptured.
Grandiosity, revenge, homoeroticism, miracles, a cave of horrors, four perfect white horses that know English and live in a tent with a guy in wizard robes who is their best friend – as far as I was concerned, Ben-Hur might as well have been Lord of the Rings. This was pre-Harry Potter, and live-action fantasy movies were thin on the ground. When you’ve already worn out your VHS tapes of Labyrinth, Dark Crystal, and The Neverending Story, antiquity is the next best thing. It’s dragon-movie methadone. (That’s why people are forever defending the treatment of rape and race on Game of Thrones by arguing that things were different “back then”. It’s easy to get confused. If you’re 11.)
Twenty years later, I approached the newly released Ben-Hur reimagining with curiosity. In case you’re not familiar with the plot, Ben-Hur is basically The Fox and the Hound – if the hound framed the fox for sedition, sold the fox into slavery, and then everyone got leprosy. Judah Ben-Hur is a wealthy Jewish prince who lives in Jerusalem with his mother, sister and crush Esther (who is also his slave, a downer of a detail that vaporises in the 2016 version). One day Judah’s childhood friend and adoptive brother Messala – now a fancy Roman tribune – clops into town and asks Judah to snitch on anti-Roman zealots so Messala can impress his boss. Judah is like, “Nah, dude, we’re cool but Rome sucks, no offence,” and so, in an extremely reasonable and proportionate response, Messala banishes his best friend to a slow death as a galley slave and imprisons or tortures Judah’s entire family and lets his ancestral home rot in ruin. The Romans run roughshod over all of Judea, pillaging Jewish gravestones to build their macabre, decadent circus so they can all go to adult horse camp. (But sure. Women are the hyper-emotional and overreactive ones.)
There’s plenty of fat to trim from Heston’s version – the aforementioned rowing, the overture and intermission, the glacial crucifixion sequence, the way the actors seem to have no concept of how long normal human beings pause between sentences. A savvy team could pare Ben-Hur down into a swift but satisfying little action movie, and Ben-Hur 2016 intermittently succeeds. (Perhaps to avoid exactly this type of comparison, the filmmakers insist that 2016’s Ben-Hur is a new adaptation of Lew Wallace’s 1880 novel, not a remake of the 1959 film.)
At the same time, though, fat is flavour. I found myself missing some of the tediousness of 1959. Instead of minute after minute of viscerally interminable rowing, we get a beard slapped on Judah’s face and a title card that says “Three Years Later”. Judah’s search for his lost mother and sister unfolds over a packed 123 minutes instead of a lingering 212, and you can feel it. Whole subplots are axed and, along with them, the character motivation that lends sense to the story’s broader architecture, and makes the denouement’s proselytising feel earned instead of like a tacked-on Jesus commercial.
The chief improvements are:
1) The casting of Morgan Freeman as Sheik Ilderim instead of Hugh Griffith in blackface (setting aside that Freeman appears to have phoned in his performance on a tin can tied to a string).
2) The fact that the 2016 centurions all look like the kind of guys who drive around with a bumper sticker that says, “No Fat Chicks, Car Will Scrape”, making them expediently hateable.
3) The CGI war galleys don’t look like bath toys smashing together.
4) Jack Huston (Judah) is very attractive, yes, hello, hi. (Heston is an intense weirdo and a superior smoulderer, but he is also Patient Zero from whence all the world’s awkwardness spawned. Sorry.)
Which is all well and good – I’m not upset that Ben-Hur 2016 exists – but … at some point can we start making new movies again? Will I have to live out the rest of my adult life drowning in franchises and reboots and remakes and Spidermen and Thors? Is it a time issue? Is everyone too busy activating almonds and sourcing camel milk to generate new ideas? Because if that’s the case, I’ve got you, Hollywood. Here are three brand new movie pitches that I just whipped up while I was watching Ben-Hur (it’s that easy!):
•An ageism lawsuit forces the Los Angeles Police Department to remove age restrictions on its application forms. A pair of toddlers rise quickly through the ranks, getting to the bottom of baby crime (and sometimes getting in over their heads!). Title: Dwagnet.
•The exact same plot as Ben-Hur, except the character of Messala is replaced with trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and instead of a chariot race at the end they compete to see who can talk about Louis Armstrong the longest.
•A mild-mannered social studies teacher on vacation in Hollywood becomes trapped in an elevator with Heston, who, it turns out, has a passionate, lifelong interest in social studies. The two eventually escape, only to discover that there has been an apocalypse and now they must repopulate the earth. It’s the only way.
- This article was amended on Thursday 25 August to correct the name of the slave Esther. An editing error led to her being incorrectly named in an earlier version.
