Feb 23 2009
The comeback of swords ‘n’ sandals: Agora
About five years ago, a young, Chile-born, Spanish filmmaker by the name of Alejandro Amenábar took the world by storm with his deeply-affecting and beautifully-lensed euthanasia drama, The Sea Inside (a.k.a. Mar adentro), scoring a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar and solidifying Javier Bardem’s international movie-star status in the process.
Some of you may not realize, however, that Amenábar was already a force to be reckoned with before he made that Academy Award-winner. He was responsible for a couple of highly influential Spanish genre efforts — 1996’s snuff-film chiller Thesis (a.k.a. Tesis) and the hallucinatory 1997 mystery, Open Your Eyes (a.k.a. Abre los ojos, which was ineptly remade in 2001 as the Tom Cruise vehicle, Vanilla Sky) — as well as the old-fashioned Hollywood ghost-story The Others.
Now he’s back with a very hush-hush project, a mega-budget historical epic called Agora. Set in Roman Egypt, the movie focuses on the rising wave of Christianity that enveloped the country and the challenges the religion posed for Hypatia (played by Rachel Weisz), the renowned philosopher and atheist of ancient Alexandria.
As I said, this movie’s had a lid kept tightly sealed over it, but it seems that an unsubtitled trailer has been leaked, which you can watch over here while it lasts. The film’s subject matter may sound deep and overly intellectual, but the stylish preview seems to promise a lot of drama and excitement, both physical and intellectual. Welcome back to the silver screen, Mr. Amenábar!
