Review of Silence (2016) by Hotelcentral — 12 Jul 2017

My suspicion is that a significant amount of what Martin Scorsese had inside his head did not actually make it into the movie because what we seem to have here is 161 minutes of screenplay that never really seems to go anywhere.

Frankly, I'd rather watch Shogun again. (I've watched it a dozen times at least.) The 1980 NBC miniseries ran on for nine hours and change and did a far better job describing Japanese culture and the trials of Europeans and the Catholic church in Japan during a period when samurai ruled the land and various warlords were competing for supreme power.

Silence, by comparison, comes to seem a bit like flogging a dead horse. It's the same thing over and over. The samurai want the priests to renounce their religion. The priests want to evangelize. The peasants get kicked back and forth between opposite poles and you should be able to guess where it all ends.

If you enjoy the obscure, then by all means sit through this film and try to scope out whatever it was that kept Martin Scorsese working on the project for 25+ years. I majored in philosophy and, sorry, I'm not seeing anything here that's particularly profound.