Director/Screenplay – Jim Carroll, Producer – Brad Keller, Photography – Ron Gonzales, Music – Chris George, Visual Effects Supervisor – Chad Briggs, Visual Effects – Post Asylum and Element X, Special Effects Supervisor – Steve Krieger, Makeup Effects – Spat Oktan, Production Design – Jason Hammond. Production Company – Timed Out Productions.
Cast
Morgan Roberts (Ram Goldstein), Ilsa Levine (Amy Lee), Donny Boaz (Brandt), Lamar Usher (Siemon Jefferson), Gerardo Davila (Ahmed Akbar), Heidi Montag (Diane), Cesir DeLa Torre (Felix Martinez), Jason Castro (Jesus), Johnny Ray Diaz (Kabil). Matthew Dillon (Peter)
Plot
Ram Goldstein is a genius physics student. Ram is then appointed head of a team at a lab run Ahmed Akbar with his classmate/girlfriend Amy working under him. Ahmed wants them to find a means of teleporting an object. They have no success until Ram works out that the teleportation process also requires moving an object four-dimensionally through time. Realising that Ram has created a time machine, Ahmed, who is an agent of Islamic jihadists, commandeers the research. Using the machine, Ahmed sends a group of soldiers back in time to Jerusalem in 33 A.D. to assassinate Jesus Christ and wipe Christianity out from world history. Locked in another laboratory, Ram and Amy try to stop Ahmed but become caught up in a labyrinth of multiple selves and time jumps.
Christian cinema has become a niche industry in the 2000s. Beginning largely in the mid-1990s, the genre had its way paved by the modest hit of The Omega Code (1999), which led to a number of other works that have enjoyed a good deal of popularity, thanks to their employing B-list Hollywood actors to carry them to audiences beyond the church faithful. (For a more detailed listing see Christian Cinema).
Most Christian Cinema is poorly made and has only one purpose – that of evangelising and preaching a heavy-handed message to non-believers. Assassin 33 A.D. may be the first Christian Cinema film that actually hooked my attention with a great premise – what if a time traveller were able to go back and kill Jesus Christ and eliminate Christianity from history? It in effect becomes an Alternate History scenario.
I watched Assassin 33 A.D., intrigued to see how the premise would play out but it is not a very well made film. A major negative point is that it trades in racial-religious caricatures. The villain of the show is Arabic and later revealed to be a jihadi Islamic extremist. This plays very much into a Christian right wing belief that Islam is a great evil that is seeking to usurp Christianity. The villain has no more dimensions than being someone who is Middle Eastern, an Islamic fundamentalist and wanting to wipe out all trace of Christianity – it is about a clearcut a stereotype as you can get.
These racial caricatures become even worse when it comes to Morgan Robert’s two colleagues – Lamar Usher and Cesir DeLa Torre, who you get the impression were cast for diversity purposes. Cesir is cast as someone from an unspecified Latino background who is an awkward nerd with an unnatural attraction to a stuffed penguin. Lamar talks with a nonsensical babble of hip urban ghetto that you get the impression is what a bunch of white people think African-American people talk like and in real-life would probably be laughed out of the hood. At one point, Lamar meets Jesus and encounters a language barrier whereupon he speaks to Jesus in child-like terms “No speako Greeko.” (This does at least make Assassin 33 A.D. one time travel film that acknowledges that people wouldn’t automatically speak modern-day English when they arrive in the past).
Time traveller Lamar Usher and Jesus Christ (Jason Castro)
The main frustration with Assassin 33 A.D. is a lack of thought gone into its screenplay. Films involving time travel scenarios, particularly those with people crossing back and forward across their own past, need to have timelines and sequences of events carefully planned out ie. where someone is in what part of the story in terms of their internal timeline as opposed to the story’s timeline. Films like Twelve Monkeys (1995), Timecrimes (2007), Black Hollow Cage (2017), In the Shadow of the Moon (2019) and Beyond the Infinite: Two Minutes (2020) are examples of works that do this well. However, this is not a good example – almost immediately after the time travel device is introduced, there are multiple sets of the same characters running around. I am used to time travel stories but I completely confused trying to work out where on the timeline all of the characters came from.
The other point is that the time travel takes the characters back to the Crucifixion ie. at a point after Jesus has clearly gotten the message out. At that point, it surely makes no difference whether Jesus is crucified or not, his message is out there. Would it not have made more sense for someone seeking to eradicate the Christian message to go back earlier, like when he was in still the manger, to assassinate Jesus before he was able to preach? Of course, the locating of events at the Crucifixion allows the film to get in its key dramatic point – to depict the resurrection and have the characters undergo a conversion experience as a result.
The other quibble is when we do get a very, very brief depiction of the alternate history scenario. Here we find that the elimination of Christianity has led to a desolate, post-apocalyptic world that has possibly been destroyed by nuclear war. However, what we never find out is a casual chain of events that go from Christianity occurring vs it not occurring and how this leads to a dead world. That the Islamic extremist villain is cackling at seeing these changes, the implication is clearly that Islam triumphant will end up obliterating the entire world.
Assassin 33 A.D. also has no interest in what such a changed world look like – no Christianity would mean no Catholic Church, no Pilgrim Fathers and would have substantial influence on the politics of European history in particular. Kim Stanley Robinson did deal with this in his superb alternate history novel The Years of Rice and Salt (2002) where Europe is wiped out by plague and Islam and China colonise most of the world with fascinating results, but Assassin 33 A.D. lets the possibilities for a great alternative history scenario fall through its hands. One other quibble might be is that for a film featuring Christian characters, it sure does feature a lot of them regularly breaking the Fifth Commandment and shooting people or killing them with sticks.
The film’s trailer makes the incredulous claim that the film was the recipient of more than fifty screenplay awards, more than any other film in history. I’m kind of the view of uh-huh, show me the proof or at least a list. I mean I wouldn’t want to be so unkind as to accuse the filmmakers of doing anything like breaking the Ninth Commandment – you know, the one about bearing false witness.
Jim Carroll subsequently made Black Easter (2021). It gets a separate IMDB listing, although that appears to just be a retitled version of Assassin 33 A.D. and is elsewhere listed as the director’s cut and run four minutes longer than this. Carroll had previously made the Christian horror film Evil Beyond You (2006), which featured more Islamic terrorists.
