One Night with the King

My husband and I recently watched One Night with the King, the movie about the Biblical figure Esther. It is hard to articulate what I think about the movie, but I will give it a shot.

You will probably like this movie if you watch it with a blank mind. If you know absolutely nothing about the story of Esther that will be a good thing. If you have never seen the Lord of the Rings trilogy, that is an even better thing. If not, then those two combined make the movie lame, lame, lame.

Well, to give the movie a fair chance, I must say that in no reviews that I read did people mention the LOTR similarities. Some Christians loved the artistic license with the screenplay and some did not. In other words, what bothered me may not bother you.

First of all, the movie is actually based on a book called Hadassah, not the book of Esther. I suppose that the artistic license taken in the movie was found in the book, but I am not going to read it to find out. An example of what I didn't like was that the only reason Xerxes believed that she was Jewish was because of a Star of David which was "hidden" in her necklace.

The Lord of the Rings was a great movie, but not to be duplicated. Sigh. Too many times did the director, screenwriter, and hair and makeup artists try to duplicate it. I know it wasn't just me, because my husband felt this way before I even mentioned it. A small example is that one of the antagonists in the movie also played Denethor, the Steward of Gondor in the LOTR. He looked exactly the same. All the way down to his hair and costume. Fortunately, the actor who played both Mordecai and Gimli actually looked like a Jewish scribe and not a dwarf. That would have been an amusing disaster.

If you have seen it, what did you think?