Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ is within the top 20 to top 10 best selling books of all time. I was very disappointed that the makers of this series did not have enough respect for a book of that magnitude to even attempt to be accurate. I could rant for a long time about inaccurate this series was, but I will just keep it to some basic info to help prevent people from being disappointed like I was.
I will first say that if you do not care about the actual story of Ben-Hur, that the production was pretty good, and you might enjoy this series. If I could block everything from my memory of the book, than I probably would have enjoyed this also.
I think the screenwriter skipped reading the book in high school and just read the Cliff Notes instead, and then wrote the script for this about 40 years later off of whatever they still remembered. That might explain the level of inaccuracy. That is all the ranting I will do. For those that read the book this is literally all they got right: a guy named Ben-Hur gets betrayed by his friend, and becomes a slave then saves a roman officer who adopts him, and then Ben-Hur vows revenge and that cumulates into a chariot race. Everything else is totally botched. Also, aside from storyline, none of actors from the Hur family look anything like a Jew, and only one actor (Kristin Kreuk--Tirzah) even attempts an accent.
This gets one star because as I said, the production was good, but the acting could have been a lot better, and you just cannot botch a book like Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ that badly and expect anything more.
8 out of 17 found this helpful