Blasphemy

Rating: 2/10 (22 January 2017)

Forgive Scorcese, Father, for he has sinned. While in general I think him to be quite overrated, I could only classify his previous movies that I've watched as at least "good". Well, there's an exception to every rule.
I honestly am at a loss for words, there is almost nothing to like in this movie. The whole plot can be described as "Japanese officials demand Garfield to denounce his religion, he refuses, common folk gets tortured", repeated a good dozen times. The protagonists are unlikable and hard to relate oneself to. (This could be intentional.) The dialogues, which comprise the bigger part of Silence, are boring and at times pretentious. (Yeah, the tree metaphors aren't nearly as smart as they try to sound.) The religious debates are shallow and bland. What's worse, some moments are outright cheesy, like Garfield's reflection morphing into the face of Jesus or God actually talking to him. The movie just fails miserably to get the audience interested and emotionally invested.
The only reasons this is not a 1/10 are the quite good cinematography and Andrew Garfield. He, now unshackled from the mediocre Spider-Man reboots, has shown for the second time in a row this year that he is a very potent actor. Still, he alone could not save this movie.
You know, the audience's experience kind of reflects the protagonist's journey. First you come to the cinema, expecting a good film on a largely unexplored topic. Then you get tortured for two and a half hours until you lose faith in Scorcese completely.