Samson (2018)

With its Dungeons & Dragons-level of swords-and-sandal violence and comic book superheroic protagonist, the story of Samson was one of the few Bible fables that ever held my interest for long.

Samson is the latest live-action realisation of the tale, featuring a good few recognisable names in supporting roles - from Billy Zane as Philistine King Balek to Rutger Hauer and Lindsay Wagner as Samson's parents.

Set around three thousand years ago, the 105-minute movie sees Dagon-worshipping Philistine Prince Rallah (Jackson Rathbone) charged by his father, Balek, with keeping the troublesome Hebrews in check, even though he'd rather his time was spent on more exciting projects elsewhere.

With the aid of his duplicitous consort Delilah (Caitlin Leahy), Rallah aims to manipulate the Hebrew's chosen champion Samson (Taylor James) - through his love for Rallah's handmaiden Taren (Frances Sholto-Douglas) - to curb any rumblings of rebellion.

But things go wrong and Rallah ends up making a worse enemy of Samson, driving the superstrong Hebrew to slaughter the entire Philistine army with just the jawbone of an ass.

Years later, Samson returns to the court of King Balek to try and negotiate a better deal for his still-oppressed people, but the residents of the city haven't forgiven him for the deaths of the soldiers and drive him out...

And into the arms of Delilah, who now claims to turned her back on Rallah since realising how wicked he was.

Samson is a high quality production. The locations (it was shot in South Africa), sets and costumes are incredible, giving the story a definite sense of verisimilitude, even if the acting is occasionally a bit wobbly and the script seems rather forgettable about such key elements as the passage of time.

Taylor James is charismatic enough as the lead, but there's an inescapable feeling that had this been filmed a decade or so earlier the chances are Duane 'The Rock' Johnson would have been in the titular role of Samson.

The film has gotten a lot of stick from reviewers for its quite earnest and pedestrian take on the story, but given that it was made by Christian film company Pure Flix, they weren't going to suddenly start injecting complex sub-plots or musical numbers into the story..

And, of course, it's earnest, it's a Bible story. They're all rather earnest... by definition.

But that doesn't stop co-directors Bruce Macdonald and Gabriel Sabloff from putting some thought into how they would realise Samson's superstrength and giving us standout action scenes along the way (the whole 'jawbone of an ass' sequence and its aftermath are truly cinematic).

Because, like, say, Titanic, we all know where the story is going, Samson's strength is in the telling and - while there are moments it veers towards Monty Python and others when it lurches towards The Scorpion King - it's well-paced and never dull.

It's not perfect, and there are missed opportunities, but I suspect Samson is exactly the film Macdonald and Sabloff set out to make for Pure Flix.

Biblical Epics

Every now and again in my non-stop viewing calendar I like to take a moment to return to the big screen epics of my youth, the grandiose Bible stories that were a staple of vintage cinema.

In those benighted, pre-VHS days, when there were only three TV channels available in the UK, I would get my large-scale fantasy fix from 1950's movies like The Ten Commandments (which I'm watching at the moment), Ben-Hur, The Robe, Quo Vadis etc which were played, it seemed, pretty much on rotation at the weekends.

I have an embarrassing childhood memory of a very young me (possibly five or six) standing in the garden with a large stick - doubling as a staff - pretending to be Moses at the top of my lungs!

Never once did I think these were anything more than pseudohistorical, sword-and-sandal, fantasy stories but there was something there that piqued my young imagination.

In parallel with my unwavering love of Ray Harryhausen films and coupled with Kirk Douglas in The Vikings and, of course, Spartacus, these movies were already shaping my "swords-and-???" tastes even before I was introduced to the works of JRR Tolkien and then Dungeons & Dragons. 

Dungeons & Dragons provided me with a way to quantify ("stat up") the things I was seeing in these movies and hearing at school during our compulsory "religious education" (which meant trying to force Christianity onto us, rather than teaching us about all the religions of the world).

At prep school, I recall excitedly going through the hymn book we were given, hunting for potential magic items: "Bring me my bow of burning gold, bring me my arrows of desire!"

In recent times, harkening back to this mini-obsession of my tween and pre-tween years, I even sought out (I think from Noble Knight Games in the  States eventually, when it didn't cost an arm and a leg to ship something across The Atlantic), the Green Ronin d20 supplement Testament, for running games in the Old Testament era.

No, it doesn't have stats for God (unlike the Fantasy Wargaming book, by the late Bruce Galloway, published in the early 1980s, which has stats for both God and the Virgin Mary) but it does go into a lot of historical detail about life and beliefs in that ancient era.

The most recent "Biblical Epic" of the peplum variety that I've seen was 2018's Samson, a pretty decent retelling of one of the few Bible stories that ever held my interest.

Although they seem to be few and far between these days, I always keep half-an-eye out for any competent "Biblical Epics" that skirt the edges of my geeky radar.