Review of Silence (2017) by Brandon Y — 08 Jan 2017

For something that was billed as Scorsese's "passion project," this film was made with surprisingly little passion. Even though he spent two and half decades trying to make Silence, the movie was surprisingly...tame. It often felt like just a cookie-cutter biopic as opposed to Scorsese's grand statement on religion, which is what I was expecting. The directoral choices were extremely bland, no clever camerawork or motifs to hang on to, and the memorable scenes or moments were few and far between. Worse yet, the whole thing was entirely based on narration, which is something that I have grown tired of over the years.

Especially compared to his other religious epics, The Last Temptation of Christ and Kundun, Silence was a huge disappointment.