Review: Agora

An epic film with a one-word name that begins with the letter ‘a’ that everyone should see. Say that phrase on the street, and people will utter ‘Avatar’; I’d rather they utter ‘Agora’.

Not that Agora is a much better film (it’s only marginally better), it’s just that its head and its heart are in the right place.
Directed and co-written by Alejandro Almenabar, a proponent of man’s ability to determine his own destiny, Agora is a sustained attack on religion – and while set in the fourth and fifth centuries, its message remains horrifyingly current.

The film’s narrative focus is on Hypatia, played by Rachel Weisz. Whether you are convinced by the UK’s most kooky actress as her generation’s leading philosopher is really neither here nor there, it’s what Hypatia believed that’s important. While nominally a pagan, the quest that dominated her life was to make sense of life, the universe and everything via her role as head of the Platonic school based at the great library in Alexandria – in modern parlance, she was a scientist.

And what a bad time for her to be a scientist as the great city, one of the unarguable birthplaces of modern civilisation, succumbed to religious tension: the ruling pagans v the jews v the christians.

The siege and subsequent sacking of the library (as depicted in the film) is one of the great crimes of the christian faith – a crime that remains unanswered for. There is still much debate about the events, but one has to accept that the library may well have been sacked several times over the centuries, each time by the followers of a different faith – and each time the collected works of early man’s greatest and most progressive thinkers were damaged and lost.

Almenabar’s pointed approach (not dissimilar to James Cameron on Avatar) paints the Jews as christ-killing merchants, obsessed with maintaining the uneasy status quo they have established with the ruling pagans, and the christians as the mob all too happy to become an army happy to kill in the name of their god. There’s no doubt of where his allegiances lie: with the progressive thinkers of antiquity, leaving behind their beliefs, consumed with the need to understand the world and man’s place in it as the new religions demand punishment for their heresy.

Combined with the sacking of the library, Hypatia’s ultimate fate left me filled with rage against any and all beliefs. Clearly, that’s not Almenabar’s intention. He wants to draw attention to the fact that religious beliefs prevent man from understanding and prevent man from achieving.

Alexandria was a crucible of progressive thought, and the sacking of the library and Hypatia’s fate are held by many scholars as the death of antiquity and the birth of a dark time for humanity, indeed our kind took a step backwards that it took many centuries to recover from. How similar does that sound to where mankind has been for the past 20 years?

Agora’s clear message is that to go forward we must abandon separatist religious beliefs and finally believe in ourselves. Almenabar had me at the metaphorical ‘hello’!

However, the film does have its minus points: a slavish fixation on period detail that draws away from the story, some dodgy casting (although the lack of well-known faces is a benefit), and an overbearing tendency towards grandiose gestures (the celestial pull-backs reminding us – one too many times – of how small we are).

Nevertheless, I’d be much happier if the 300 million people that have seen Avatar (my conservative estimate) saw this instead.
Score: 7/10