Journey to Bethlehem (2023)

A musical retelling of the New Testament that feels like a mashup of Bollywood and the Star Wars prequels should be more fun than this. To be fair, there's still some fun here, but we're talking "Disney Channel original" with improved production values fun, not Chronicles of Riddick-level fun (despite Herod's soldiers' armor kind of looking like that of the Necromongers). It's bizarre, bordering on so-bad-it's-good, and may even cross that line, depending on your inclinations towards cheesy teen musicals.

Because, to be clear, that's what this is. Hell, it's what it's going for! The movie, directed (and co-written and bunch of other stuff) by music producer Adam Anders, is aimed at teens, and the central message of the thing is "Mary and Joseph were just like you!" Well, that and variations on "you can make a difference, too," "you're part of God's plan," and "shut up and have babies."

Okay, that last one might be an uncharitable interpretation for a movie that goes out of its way to portray Mary as strong and independent, but fair or not, it's hard not to read that into the subtext. Mary's arc in the film is built around realizing that her plan of holding off on marriage to pursue a career is insignificant compared with God's plan for her. If the movie's built around the idea its target audience is like Mary, the movie seems to be implying teenage girls watching should follow suit. I have no idea whether this was intentional (I'd like to assume not, but it aligns pretty damn neatly with one half of the US political spectrum). Either way, it's not what I want to see from movies for teens in this day and age.

Setting theme aside, this didn't work from a character standpoint, either. It's not that it couldn't work - humanizing these characters and retelling this story in ways that mirror the modern world is a fine approach - but rather the execution failed to come together. The largest problem is one of scale: this doesn't seem to understand the dynamics separating grand epics and small, human stories. It knows that it wants to be the latter but doesn't realize doing so effectively would have required cutting down the side plots. Instead, we spend a significant portion of the runtime cutting back to the three wise men or King Herod and his son, a decision that dilutes the point of view. This either needs to be Mary's story (Mary and Joseph's would be fine), or it needs to be an epic about the coming of a savior. Failing to stick with the central POV unravels the whole thing.

Though it was kind of unraveling on its own. The three wise men are played for comedy, and the jokes just aren't at the level they need to be. Likewise, Herod is portrayed as a cartoonishly evil villain who plays like a cross between Skeletor and Scar from The Lion King. I should note it's Antonio Banderas in the role, which is at least fun in the abstract. The character doesn't work, but it should at least make for some fun clips out of context.

Herod's son is conceptually interesting: a loyal soldier to the king who ultimately chooses to be a better person. He's humanity in a microcosm, a person who finds redemption in the presence of the Lord (though notably due to Mary, as we need to pay off a couple of her character beats). Unfortunately it's all so ridiculously telegraphed it loses most of its emotional weight.

And, again, it draws our attention (and more importantly the movie's limited runtime) away from Mary and Joseph. At the end of the day, all that really matters for this project is whether they can sell us on the stakes and subjective experience of their story, and it really just flounders. They spend half the movie and numerous songs trying to develop what amounts to a Hallmark Christmas template in the margins - we get the meet-cute, the initial animosity, the disagreement that divides them, and even the kiss withheld for the end - but it never conveys any real emotion or pathos.

There are ways to pull this off, at least in the abstract. This movie is clearly inspired by Bollywood (and other Indian film industries), which (in my limited experience) often take a similar approach to tone and various perspectives. But those movies (or at least the ones I've seen) are longer than the 90 or so minutes this thing's playing with. The asides in Journey to Bethlehem literally come at the expense of Mary and Joseph's story, which feels shallow and rushed.

Which is a shame for one reason only: Fiona Palomo, the actress cast as Mary, is doing some great work in this thing. She conveys emotion, sells tension, and comes closest to pulling this together into something redeemable. The filmmakers seem to have understood this, as she's the only character they manage to film in ways that begin to capture some of the iconography. The version of this that could have worked would have been rewritten to center entirely around her.

Let's talk Christmas. Journey to Bethlehem seems to be set during what we now consider the holiday season, and if you're thinking that's obvious, I'll remind you that the versions of the story in the actual Bible pretty explicitly weren't. I say this "seems" to be set in December, because I'm extrapolating from the snow, which....

Sigh. Okay. Let's dig into this.

When Jesus is born at the end of the movie, it gets cold and starts snowing, in the tradition of countless holiday movies. Also the star seems to go supernova or something, there's light and gold pixy dust everywhere, a bunch of angels start singing... whatever. I'm still not over the goddamn snow.

As far as I know, there's no precedent for this outside of a 1975 Rankin/Bass special called The First Christmas: The Story of the First Christmas Snow that's been largely (and rightly) forgotten. I could absolutely be wrong about this - there is a lot of lore surrounding the holidays, and even after fifteen years of this, I'm still constantly learning about new stories and legends related to the season. So I absolutely acknowledge there might be an obscure tradition built around the idea that it miraculously snowed in the Middle East at the time of Jesus's birth. Maybe.

But I spent some time looking online back when we reviewed that and came up with nothing. Still, I want to acknowledge in advance that if there is a folktale or old story surrounding this idea, the inclusion of this detail in this movie is not inherently, profoundly, monumentally stupid. However, if they did make this up (or borrow it from the Rankin/Bass special), then it's just as ridiculously idiotic as it appears.

Moving on.

The songs in this didn't work for me, but then I'm obviously not the target audience. Still, the use of pop music rarely feels tonally right for the characters' predicaments (though there are a few counterexamples). In addition, this is a case where the movie's narrative feels like it's constantly twisting and warping to accommodate musical numbers. Interestingly, the handful of authentic Christmas carols - particularly "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel" and "Silent Night" - pack a bit of a punch. For my money, those work a lot better than the stuff they wrote. But if you find a fifteen year old girl with the opposite opinion, her opinion counts for a hell of a lot more than mine in this case.

The production values on the musical numbers look good, but several also have a heavy VH1 vibe, for those of us old enough to remember VH1. The rest tend to be more "musical theater" in approach. Those were a little better, but it's clear this was written by people with a background in pop music, not Broadway.

The sets and costumes in this are intended to look like, well, sets and costumes. This is stylized to evoke a blend of sources, none of them historically accurate. As such, I won't be complaining about anachronistic clothing or spaces that look like literal Nativity scenes. Likewise, I don't mind them drawing design elements from Bollywood for the most part, though the birth sequence may have crossed a line.

I will, however, reiterate that a number of sequences bear a notable resemblance to other pop culture brands in ways that become notable problems for the film. The wedding sequence, for examples, comes far too close to looking like Star Wars cosplay. Some of this is due to like sources (space opera's been drawing from Roman costuming since its inception), but the movie fails to take steps to avoid this comparison, and it's hard to ignore. It doesn't help that a bit later the movie shows the Star of Bethlehem in the sky along with the setting sun, and it looks for all the world like the Binary Sunset on Tatooine.

I also want to acknowledge there are a handful of moments that work. I mentioned the use of traditional Christmas songs in a couple scenes - I really did find those effective. Likewise there were a couple lines that delivered a bit of a punch, though I suspect both were mostly just sold by Palomo acting the shit out of the script she was working with (seriously, someone cast her in something good, please). And I do appreciate that they were trying something difficult here. Retelling the Nativity is tough under any circumstances; doing so in the midst of a musical romcom with a Bollywood aesthetic is a hell of an ambitious undertaking, particularly for a first-time director.

Unfortunately, the thing about ambitious undertakings is they often fail pretty spectacularly.