It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Was this yet another ratings sweep remake of a highly acclaimed film to con TV viewers into watching it at least once? Suffers from all the movie killer flaws that very nearly all "Made for TV" movies have, including cheap production values, mediocre acting, poor audio and visual special effects, mediocre script and dialog, bloat to fill alloted time slot(s), and erratic pacing for commercial break and episode split timing. Save your money, do NOT buy this! Save your time, don't watch it if they rerun it on TV. Wishing I hadn't wasted my time watching the first part. See the 1959 spectacular instead. It's INFINITELY better.

first impressive thing is the ambition to create a new adaptation to a classic book. than to look the best way to be more than a great movie remake.and not the last, to have success. result - an adaptation for new generations. not original but good. interesting, giving new nuances - Stephen Campbell Moore does a real seductive Messala, more credible than in 1959 version, Ben Cross is a realistic Tiberius and Joseph Morgan is far to be another Charlton Heston. but the last fact could be a virtue because it is Ben Hur of a new time, part of a chain of blockbusters who use the Greek- Roman mythology and histories.so, a good film. for script, cast but, more important, for science to present a story in right nuances. and that fact is important.

Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ is within the top 20 to top 10 best selling books of all time. I was very disappointed that the makers of this series did not have enough respect for a book of that magnitude to even attempt to be accurate. I could rant for a long time about inaccurate this series was, but I will just keep it to some basic info to help prevent people from being disappointed like I was.I will first say that if you do not care about the actual story of Ben-Hur, that the production was pretty good, and you might enjoy this series. If I could block everything from my memory of the book, than I probably would have enjoyed this also.I think the screenwriter skipped reading the book in high school and just read the Cliff Notes instead, and then wrote the script for this about 40 years later off of whatever they still remembered. That might explain the level of inaccuracy. That is all the ranting I will do. For those that read the book this is literally all they got right: a guy named Ben-Hur gets betrayed by his friend, and becomes a slave then saves a roman officer who adopts him, and then Ben-Hur vows revenge and that cumulates into a chariot race. Everything else is totally botched. Also, aside from storyline, none of actors from the Hur family look anything like a Jew, and only one actor (Kristin Kreuk--Tirzah) even attempts an accent.This gets one star because as I said, the production was good, but the acting could have been a lot better, and you just cannot botch a book like Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ that badly and expect anything more.

Well, this little thing certainly caught me by surprise when it cropped up on British TV recently: i was completely unaware of this remake-of-a-remake (with a third version of "The Thing" playing in cinemas at the moment, it seems to be the in-thing these days...).And yet i was not as let down as i expected to be. Despite the flaws of an obvious television budget - although stretching to some very picturesque location cinematography - the well worn story of Judah Ben-Hur is related and realised in an accessible and enjoyable fashion. Featuring a cast very familiar to viewers of sci-fi and fantasy - Alex Kingston (Doctor Who), Kristin Kreuk (Smallville), Ben Cross (Star Trek), and Ray Winstone (err.. Robin of Sherwood? I may be stretching a point here) - we are treated to a small-screen epic of Roman intrigue, family infighting, and brother against brother in the ancient world. Of course, some of the most famous setpieces of the famous Heston movie are recreated, some done very well such as the naval battle at sea, some not - like the epic chariot race reduced to a glorified Go-Kart chase around a dirt track.So some of the grandeur and pomp is missing, but the heart of the original story is still here. Unfortunately, the actor portraying Messala lacks the charismatic evil of Stephen Boyd, coming across at times like a thuggish Roman skinhead. Thankfully, however, our Ben-Hur is no Heston, and actually imparts some emotion into the role instead of macho and mannequinish posturing. It's sad to see that the homoerotic subtext that film screenwriter Gore Vidal imparted into the relationship between the two protagonists was not recreated: if Vidal could smuggle it unsuspected past Heston in the '50s, then surely it could have gotten by the network censors today?In any event, this was a thoroughly enjoyable romp through an oft-told tale. One can only hope that this story can be left in peace for a while now. Oh, and one more thing: i would've thought they'd cast a more charismatic actor as Jesus. I had trouble thinking anyone would follow this bloke into the pub,never mind the Kingdom of Heaven.