Agora, extraordinarily ambitious and majestically cerebral, is a flawed film to be sure. Its reach—nothing short of celestial mechanics and the frequently violent intersection of science and religion—certainly exceeds its grasp. But the reach itself is worthy of praise. Religion is not alone in claiming martyrs; the secular has its fair share of fallen heroes and it is high time they too are celebrated. Where Agora sometimes fails as a film, it can never fail as a spark to ignite the fires of conversation. At last, this is a sword and sandal epic with its mind in the right place.

In the ancient city of Alexandria, the brilliant female philosopher and astronomer Hypatia (Rachel Weisz) guides an assemblage of disciples whose aim is to save the wisdom of the ancient world, even as violent religious upheaval spills into the streets. Mobs destroy the great library, indiscriminately trammeling the works of literature and learning it holds. Overnight, one of the seven wonders of the world is obliterated. As the rise of Christianity threatens to tear Roman-occupied Egypt—and indeed, the entire empire—apart, a religious civil war breaks out, forcing Hypatia’s students to take sides. While she attempts to maintain a semblance of rationality in the midst of mob killings and book burnings, Hypatia’s young slave Davus (Max Minghella) is torn between his love and devotion to her, and the freedom and empowerment he knows can be his if he joins the ascendant Christian cause.

This is not a meek Christianity, a Christianity that loves its enemies, but instead the religion of Constantine, a faith unafraid to take its place by force. Religion powers political zeal. Familiar with a modernity in which Islam converts by the sword, here history is shown as a Möbius strip, continually repeating itself in the throes of other aggressive tenets, now slumbering peacefully. But the film’s aim is not to skewer any single religion. Indeed all faiths, from Hellenistic polytheism to Judaism, are censured. More unites us than divides us, the film implores. But in the end, however, Agora denounces religion even as it uplifts rationality and science. Ben Hur this is not.

Agora is a love song to cosmology, knowledge and skepticism disguised as a sword and sandal epic. Hypatia is seen as a shrewd and perceptive astronomer, conceiving of a heliocentric model of the solar system long before Nicolaus Copernicus and the Renaissance. I cannot help but laud entertainment that elevates the wonders of scientific inquiry and extols pushing back the frontiers of ignorance. We need more movies like this. I appreciate deeply what this film is trying to do. And yet, Agora bites off more than it can chew. Its historical scope, encompassing more than a decade’s time and a succession of similar yet divergent religiously combustible events, is overwhelmed by the sheer scale of its tale. The humanizing narrative, meant to keep it earthbound, is not equal to the sweep of the larger, true story. It would have worked far better as a mini-series, broken up into bite-sized chunks, than a single account, buttressed by odd intertitles and jumps in time. Nor does it find a way to show, rather than tell its scientific pursuits, falling back too often on nearly stale exposition.

Director Alejandro Amenábar (The Sea Inside, The Others) has made an ambitious film and for that he should be praised. Agora is lavishly directed and pulsates with creative stylization. The mix of practical sets and computer-generated cities teeming with extras is reminiscent of other period pieces of this sort, such as Gladiator, even as it is clearly superior. Amenábar has done something few have tried—an unrepentantly secular film that has, at its core, a female protagonist who is the embodiment of pure, unswerving rationality. He has made a profoundly feminist film, a female empowerment picture in which the heroine does not take up a weapon to hew her enemies down, but uses the vastly superior faculties of her intellect.

Amenábar frequently launches new scenes by going to a place we’ve never seen historical epics go before, namely into outer space. The camera hovers in orbit, sometimes taking in the planet in full, sometimes plummeting through the atmosphere to finally light on the tiny speck that is Alexandria. The shots, as jarring in a film like this as they are majestic, encourage us to recall the tremendous scale of Hypatia’s celestial pursuits as well as let us know right away that this story is far bigger than tiny Alexandria and indeed the tiny planet it rests upon.

I found myself reminded of the sage words of Carl Sagan: “Consider again that dot. That’s here, that’s home, that’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.”

© Copyright 2010 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.

Directed by Alejandro Amenábar
Starring: Rachel Weisz, Max Minghella, Oscar Isaac, Michael Lonsdale
This film is not rated.
Running Time: 127 minutes