peteg's blog - noise - movies - 2011 09 20 Agora

Agora

Tue, Sep 20, 2011./noise/movies | Link

This swords-and-sandals mini-epic is beautifully shot and sometimes effective, with Rachel Weisz doing the heavy lifting. The plot is pretty scatty, as exemplified by a massive non sequitur in the middle where she gets hitched to her womanising student that she had previously handed her monthly cycle to. This compromise makes her later uncompromise difficult to comprehend. Also her verbalising "what if we look at the world as it really is" flies in the face of Hypatia's platonism; maybe they could have given the lines to an offsider named Empiricles or something. I did like the way they introduced her slave to Christianity, as it was abundantly clear what the attraction was. Conversely it is a bit surprising that he doesn't have a crisis of faith at some point, especially towards the end.