Roundtable: Assassin 33 A.D. (2020)

**How Assassin 33 A.D. compares to other Christian films**

Aren: It may be obviously low-budget and some of the acting is poor, but about 10 minutes into Assassin 33 A.D., it’s pretty clear how much better this film is than anything made by PureFlix. The film has a ludicrous plot hook: a group of brilliant young scientists invent time travel, but a rich tech-baron Muslim Jihadist uses that technology to send a team of assassins back in time to kill Jesus Christ and prevent the creation of Christianity. But that plot turns out to be a lot more fascinating that it sounds, and the film actually plays its ludicrous scenario straight, with a minimum of pandering to the usual church crowd.

Anders: This is because, even if it has a pretty clear religious position, Assassin 33 A.D. is first and foremost trying to tell a story that will be entertaining to the faithful, rather than act as a tract or work of proselytizing.

Aren: To be clear, the film plays into some classic Christian movie tropes like the villain being a Muslim Jihadist (and “the world’s richest immigrant”), but it also has an atheist Jew be the hero, so it’s not like it’s taking the same political approach as the disgusting God’s Not Dead.

Anders: It’s true that having the villains be Islamic terrorists does reinforce some of the stereotypes of Muslims, even if the filmmakers make some attempt to modulate their characterization with a throwaway line to make it clear that they aren’t saying all Muslims would want to do this. As the main character Ram (Morgan Roberts) says, “These guys are extremists.”

Anton: Is it a “throwaway” line? I agree it’s not a huge conversation, but it’s actually part of an important discussion. One of the crew asks why Muslims would want to kill Jesus, since they revere him as a prophet (as opposed to the Son of God), and Ram says, “They wouldn’t. These guys are extremists.” It actually makes an Obama-style move in cutting off radical Islam from the main branch of the religion. Anyways, it’s an intriguing small piece of dialogue, particularly since it troubles assumptions about Assassin 33 A.D. being made solely for a particular one-minded kind of American evangelical Christian.

Anders: Maybe it’s not a throwaway in the sense of being disposable, but it’s certainly not underlined or placed front and centre.

Anton: I also think we need to clarify the situation of the movie. Why would killing Jesus stop Christianity, since its founder dies in the religion’s core stories? They actually address this aspect.

Anders: If I understand it correctly, they believe that by preventing Jesus from dying on the cross and being buried in the tomb, they are stopping the disciples from stealing the body and perpetuating what one of them calls the biggest lie ever concocted: the idea that Jesus rose from the grave.

A complicated time travel plot

Aren: It may be absurd to say, but the only film I can think of in terms of comparable timeline complexity is Shane Carruth’s Primer. Director Jim Carroll and his team really put a lot of effort into thinking out the various timelines and how they intersect and he trusts the audience to follow along. I assumed the film would half-ass the science fiction aspects, but I think the time travel plotline is actually the most fleshed out aspect of the entire film.

Anton: I think you need to unpack that a bit Aren. How are the various timelines produced?

Aren: So, there are three main timelines at work here, which are created through time travel paradoxes and the actions of the characters. They’re colour-coded by the tie that the villain, Ahmed Akbar (Gerardo Davila), is wearing: one purple, one green, and one yellow/brown. In the first one, Ahmed’s security chief, Brandt (Donny Boaz), and his fellow operators travel back in time and kill Jesus (Jason Castro) in the Garden of Gethsemane. Ram and his fellow scientists travel back in time to try to stop him, but they’re too late, and one of them ends up taking a device that sends them back to an alternative timeline prior to the events of the first one. So in that timeline, they brief their alternate versions of themselves about what’s happening and those versions of the scientists travel back in time to stop Brandt and his operators from killing Jesus, and then end up inserting themselves into the Gospel narrative. Brandt, for instance, escapes, but is arrested for trying to steal some tomatoes (a bizarre anachronism) and ends up being crucified alongside Jesus. Eventually, this all reaches a head in the third timeline where they stop the assassination attempt and also travel back to the first timeline prior to any of the events, and convince Brandt to stop it before it starts. So the time travel paradoxes loop back on themselves and end up resolving fairly neatly. It’s unquestionably hard to follow, but that’s part of the nature of time travel narratives.

Did I get this correct?

Anders: Sounds about right to me.

Anton: Thanks, Aren. I didn’t want to do the hard part myself. Ha ha.

The plot can be hard to follow, but you are right: it’s not because it’s poorly thought-out or narrated. Rather, it’s because we, the viewer, are trying to sort out how the timelines interact as we watch the film. It’s purposefully opaque at times, and actually, like the indie-classic Primer, operates with fewer redundancies to clarify things for the audience than your average Hollywood movie.

Anders: The filmmakers are clearly fans of science fiction, in addition to religious stories. They have thought about what kind of time travel film they want to make—a closed loop, rather than parallel branching timeline story. And they were obviously inspired by non-religious stories like The Terminator—the villains are basically trying to pull a Skynet and eliminate this “J.C.” before he can accomplish his task—or Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder”—they understand the ripple effect that small changes can have on the timeline.

Anton: Maybe the other touchstone could be Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban?

Anders: Maybe, but I’d suggest that Harry Potter and this film both look back to those classic time travel stories. Also, references to Harry Potter might be lost on significant chunks of this film’s imagined evangelical audience.

Anton: Anyone else want to comment on the dark imagined future of the timeline in which Christianity is prevented from being founded? It’s a neat moment, but also a bizarre one in its assumption of a world without Christianity becoming not only worse (from the filmmaker’s perspective) but positively dystopian. All dark clouds and ruined cityscapes.

The scene seems clearly inspired by the “desert of the real” world in The Matrix, when Morpheus reveals reality to Neo.

Anders: Yes, that definitely seems to be the touchstone in that scene, showing once again the lineage the filmmakers see themselves working in. I think the idea is that the major thing missing would be forgiveness, right? I find it a refreshing alternative to some of the defenses of Christianity that insist that it’s technology and culture that would be the major loss. Obviously the butterfly effect of missing one of the world’s largest religions would be even bigger, but it’s still interesting, even if non-Christians might quibble with the idea.

Theological implications

Aren: I also think it’s interesting how the film seems to make forgiveness a narrative act in the plot itself, through the timelines and the overlapping events from past and present, which is a pretty interesting way of externalizing the entire process of forgiveness, which can be incredibly uncinematic in faith-based films.

Anton: What do you mean by forgiveness as a narrative act?

Aren: What I mean is that in the film, the act of forgiveness actually changes the timelines. Ram is meant to “forgive Brandt” for killing him in a different timeline, so when he goes back to the original timeline before the bad guys have time traveled to kill Jesus, his forgiveness of Brandt changes Brandt’s actions and forges a new timeline. Usually, in these sorts of movies, forgiveness has no narrative effect on the film; it’s just the assumed conclusion after all the other actions, but here, forgiveness is central to the plot resolving. That’s what I mean by narrative act; it’s not just thematic but essential to the outcome of narrative.

Anton: Yes, so forgiveness causes a turn in the plot, rather than being merely the product of the resolution of other events. Forgiveness is action not sentiment (which also distinguishes the film from too many other Christian ones). Forgiveness is an act on which human relations pivot, and the film seems to make a case that forgiveness can transcend ordinary understandings of space and time, since Ram forgives Brandt even though he technically hasn’t committed the wrong of killing Jesus in that timeline. Kinda reminds me of Interstellar’s famous dialogue about love having interdimensional transcendent power.

Anders: It also imagines a God who is big enough to be unaffected by the “God-like” powers that technology and science have granted humans today, while incorporating them into a Christian theistic concept of reality. It takes for granted Einstein’s thesis that time is a dimension of space, and it recognizes that if God is truly omnipotent and eternal, he must exist outside of both time and space, able to work it all to his purposes. Sometimes it’s a bit clunky, but it never attempts to undermine modern science and technology in its efforts to confirm the belief in God’s sovereignty.

Philip K. Dick and speculative fiction

Aren: On the Chapo Trap House episode where they reviewed Assassin 33 A.D., Will Menakar remarks that the film has elements of a Philip K. Dick story in how reality shifts depending on the events of the timeline and how the characters place themselves into the actual Gospel events. It’s a perceptive comment, because the moments that have Ram as the man in the linen cloth in Gethsemane, the other scientist Simon (Lamar Usher) as Simon of Cyrene, or Brandt as the thief who begs Jesus’ forgiveness on the cross are eerily effective works of speculative fiction. They conjure hints of that speculative power that you’ll find in Dick’s novels like VALIS or The Man in the High Castle, or the musings about travelling back in time to see if Jesus is really dead on the cross in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. Any film that makes me think of these works, even if it doesn’t attain their greatness, has to get some credit.

Anton: That’s probably my favourite part of Assassin 33 A.D.: the insertion of the characters into the actual Gospel narratives.

One insertion functions as a gloss on a cryptic passage. In Mark 14:51–52, “A young man, wearing nothing but a linen garment, was following Jesus. When they seized him, he fled naked, leaving his garment behind.” This is a strange passage with various interpretations, such as that Mark is planting a reference to himself here. The movie gives its own novel explanation. The man is Ram, and he had just a robe on because he had removed his modern clothes in order to blend in.

The other two insertions are less exegetical and more sci-fi. Having the character Simon become the man who helps Jesus carry the cross and Brandt become the good thief who is pardoned by Jesus are actually a bit audacious, and it shows how the filmmakers are just as invested in their time-travel speculations as they are in evangelism. I can imagine a more reverent filmmaker refusing to suggest that some silly time travel is actually part of the Gospel stories.

That mid-credits scene

Aren: What is going on in that insane mid-credits scene where Ram and Mary travel 30 years into the future and end up the captives of the Antichrist’s agents? I can’t wait for a possible sequel, hopefully titled Assassin 666.

Anders: That would be a really great title! It really shows the imagination and robustness of the story that Carroll and his crew have come up with, especially when contrasted with works like Left Behind.

Anton: Or is it driving the work into Left Behind territory by teasing an Antichrist narrative?

Anders: I’m not saying that it’s not rooted in the same kind premillennial dispensationalist theology that most American evangelicalism holds, but that it sees the imaginative potential of such events, compared with the literal-minded and tiny imagining of the Left Behind books. So, while I may not buy the theological flavour that the filmmakers are coming from, I appreciate that they haven’t let their beliefs diminish their imagination. It’s good fun!

Assassin 33 A.D. (2020, USA)

Written and directed by Jim Carroll; starring Morgan Roberts, Donny Boaz, Niki Spiridakos, Lamar Usher, Gerardo Davila, Jason Castro, Johnny Rey Diaz, Heidi Montag.