"You Don't Want to Mess with an Angel"

"You Don't Want to Mess with an Angel".  That is a quote from my youngest daughter as she saw the Asian "ninja" angel take down the evil men from Sodom who were trying to keep Lot and his family from leaving Sodom.

I will tell you the things that I liked about the Bible.

There was non-cheesy and fairly solid acting. 

I appreciated the well done CGI (computer generated imagery).  The movie cleverly began with the Ark of Noah being tossed about in the violence of the Great Flood and, in the Ark, Noah trying to help his family pass the time told them and us the story of Creation and the how sin, the sad fact of humanity, had brought this disaster upon mankind.    

I was glad there were non-watered down Biblical epic battles.  This is important if we are to capture the attention of young men who need to know that there are sword fights in the Bible and that it is a book of epic-ness and that angels are tough and don't look like Roma Downey.  

I liked that we got to see Abraham kick butt when he freed Lot and that father Abraham wasn't some wimp in a robe who just sat under trees talking to God.  I liked the way that we knew that that was the pre-Incarnate Jesus Christ visiting Abe - but they kept his face out of focus to maintain the absolute coolness and mystery of a theophany.

There was moving music by legendary cinematic composer Hans Zimmer that helped establish the mood of each scene.  They managed to truncate the many Bible stories so that the story tellers could move us through hundreds of years of Biblical history in two hours without losing the substance.

There wasn't much that I didn't like about these first two episodes of The Bible.  I do wish there had been the story of Issac and Jacob and Joseph, but when you have to take people on a flash tour through the Old Testament not everybody gets their time in the spotlight.  If this had been a series instead of a mini-series I'm sure we would have been treated to those accounts as well.

To me, a guy who has seen a lot of cheesy Christian stuff in his lifetime, I was glad that Mark Burnett and Roma Downey's money was not wasted.

I look forward to next week's episode.

'Nuff said.