The Message (1977)

Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

I expected to learn a lot more than I actually did. The acting was terrible with little conviction. I wondered how they shouted Allah hu Akbar at the beginning of the movie when no one was yet converted to Islam and Mohammed had not yet started preaching his message. The movie went into Islam superficially in my opinion. It purported to deliver the message. If it did it did not come through. The message deserved far far better than the movie delivered. I was excited to watch it in the first place, but in the end I was unmoved

A highly ambitious film, capturing the life of Muhammad. Due to the nature of the subject, director Moustapha Akkad had to thread his way between many restrictions. Not only did the film have to be accurate in its depiction of Muhammad, as anything short of this would be sacrilegious, but, in order to reach a wider audience, it had to appeal to non-Muslims too. Furthermore, his main character could not be shown at all!Despite these requirements and limitations, Akkad ultimately made a fine movie. Epic in scale, lavish in production and engaging in plot. It clocks in at a touch under three hours but doesn't feel like it, it moves along so smoothly. Akkad gets around the inability to show Muhammad through some clever devices, often concentrating on his senior aides rather than the man himself, and when he does have to have him present, doing it from a first person perspective. Not as engaging as if we actually had the main character visible, but I can't think of a better way he could have made the film, given that restriction.As a person who does not know much about the history of Muhammad and Islam, quite edifying.Good cinematography and battle scenes. Decent performances too.

Propaganda akin to Communist or Nazi Literature. I couldn't bear to sit through the several hours of mind twisting nonsense. And a reading of the Koran does not tally up with the pristineness of the movie. Where are the references in the movie to the many violent passages in the Koran? None at all. Skip! 8.3 on IMDB??? Yeah, if this is a fairy-tale movie. But it's not. It pretends to narrate actual history but is really fiction.

Cinematically, it was pretty good. Clearly a lot of work went into the sets, costumes & locations. While the acting was adequate, I have to disagree with other reviews in that I did not think it was Anthony Quinn's greatest work. Maybe because I viewed it through the lens of Christianity or maybe it was the way the actors talked to the camera when addressing Mohammed (i.e., it is against Islam to show the likeness of Mohammed - sort of a parallel to Jews never wring the word God - they spell it G-d), the movie had an odd "vibe" about it. The story itself is difficult to follow, much like the Koran itself. Though downplayed in the movie, early messages from God conflicted with later messages. It also plays up the 'peaceful' side of Islam, (but there again the movie has some fantastic battle scenes, if you overlook the overly fake looking blood) which stands in stark contrast to the evidence we see on the nightly news. Ideally, every Muslim would embrace the teachings of this movie and renounce the more radical teachings - not just the modern day "terrorist" mindset, but the way the early Muslims treated women in the early years seems to be quite different than today. I can't think of a Christian equivalent of this movie, as most movies about early Christianity only tell a small portion of the story. This movie attempts to explain the roots of Islam from when Mohammed began hearing from God at age 40, in about 610 AD to the full establishment of Islam around the world. It does to a reasonably good job for the early parts of Islam, but I kind of got lost in all the who's fighting who scenes. It was apparently all historically verified at the time of its making by Islamic scholars,which is explained at the beginning and end of the movie, which only adds to the eerie feeling the movie being less documentary and more propagandist. So, in short, the cinematic presentation is quite good, but the story is hard to follow and I felt it had a propagandist "vibe" throughout the movie. If you have 3 hours to kill and are interested in the subject matter, you'll likely enjoy it. For me I got restless in the middle when I started to get confused about who is battling who and for what reason.