The Young Messiah (Sean Bean) - June 14, 2016

[littleprince32]

Special Features
-Feature Commentary with Director/Co-Writer Cyrus Nowrasteh and Co-Writer Betsy Giffen Nowrasteh
-Deleted Scenes
-The Making of The Young Messiah

[HDTV1080P]

The Young Messiah on Blu-ray (brief user review)

The Young Messiah is a Christian movie that shows some historical facts from the New Testament about Jesus as a Child mixed in with some unbiblical stories about Jesus as a child. The movie is based on the fictional novel called “Christ The Lord: Out of Egypt”. The Young Messiah had a budget of $18.5 million dollars and box office sells were $7.2 million dollars. Therefore, the movie lost several millions of dollars since the mainstream Christian community decided not to support this fictional movie about Jesus.

The Young Messiah is not completely fictional, it does show some historical New Testament accounts of when Jesus as a child became separated from his parents while visiting the Rabbi’s in the Temple. The problem with this movie, is that it offended both Roman Catholics and Protestants since the movie used some unbiblical text about Jesus as a child that is considered to be blasphemous. Long after the New Testament was completed there were unbiblical manuscripts in the second century that claimed that Jesus performed miracles as a child. From a Christian point of view the problem with this movie is that it shows Jesus as a child performing miracles (raising a bird from the dead, healing people, and even raising people from the dead). Christians believe the Bible is 100% historically and prophetically accurate. According to scripture Jesus began his ministry and started performing his first miracles after he was baptized around the age of 30 years old (Luke 3:23 , Luke 3:21-22 ).

If the Young Messiah movie would have removed all the unbiblical scenes where Jesus performed miracles as a child, then this movie would have been historically accurate according to the New Testament. If one would ignore these miracle scenes then this Christian movie would have been a lot more enjoyable. Watching Jesus life as a child was interesting at times. However to be honest, this movie does drag a little and is boring at times. This is on the bottom of my list of Christian movies that I would recommend to people, especially Christians. The movie lost several millions of dollars since it was offensive to the core audience which is the Christian community. What would have made the movie much more popular is if the movie would have removed the unbiblical Jesus child miracle scenes and instead insert a timeline that would show Jesus slowly growing up to the age of 30.

Video comments

The Young Messiah contains both a 1080P Blu-ray and a 480i DVD in the same package. For those families that own 100% Blu-ray players, there is no need to even use the 480i DVD. Except for some exclusive secular movie trailers on the DVD, the DVD contains the exact same program and extras as the Blu-ray disc, and is included because some families have not upgraded all their DVD players to Blu-ray players yet. The 480i DVD is a dual layer DVD with 7.71GB used out of 8.5GB. The dual layer Blu-ray disc for The Young Messiah uses 37.8GB out of 50GB.

The Young Messiah movie, extras, and main menu on the Blu-ray disc uses the MPEG-4/AVC codec at a resolution of 1080P. Many scenes in the movie have a high MPEG-4/AVC bit rate of around 35Mbps and higher, with average bit rates of around 32Mbps for several parts of the movie. Very rarely did the bit rate fall below 32Mbps. The 1080P resolution detail and color depth of this movie was excellent. This movie is reference material in terms of picture quality when compared to some other Christian movies that I have seen on Blu-ray. According to the audio commentary track, a Red Epic 5K digital camera was used on this movie. 3 cameras, sometimes 4 were used to create the movie. This movie should have been released on the 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray format, however instead it was only released on standard 1080P Blu-ray instead.

For those that need or want to use subtitles, this movie has English SDH, Spanish, and French subtitle options.

Audio comments

The Young Messiah Blu-ray disc movie soundtrack contains a lossless English 5.1 DTS-HD Master audio soundtrack that is bit for bit exactly the same as the studio master. The soundtrack sounded very good with voices coming out of the center channel, low bass coming out of the subwoofer for some scenes, and surround sound effects coming out of the rear speakers. Overall no complaints with the audio. The movie also contains a lossy Spanish 5.1 DTS soundtrack at 768kbps. Another nice feature regarding this movie is that it contains a lossy English DVS (Descriptive Video Service) soundtrack which is a narrated descriptions of key visual elements for the blind or visually impaired (192kbps). The main menu audio is lossy 5.1 Dolby Digital (640kbps).

Extra features

One will want to make sure their BD-LIVE feature is turned on in their Blu-ray player and with a minimum of 1GB of internal or external storage reserved for BD-LIVE. Universal Studios is one of the main studios that still uses the BD-LIVE feature. In addition, I believe that this movie is the first or one of the very first Christian movies to make use of the BD-LIVE feature. When starting the Blu-ray disc or when clicking on the “Previews” option from the main disc menu, if your Blu-ray player is connected to the Internet, the most modern movie trailers from Universal studios will be streamed over the Internet at MPEG-4/AVC 1080P quality with 2.0 DTS stereo sound. The streaming 1080P picture and sound quality is at lower bit rates when compared to disc based trailers, however the advantage of BD-LIVE is the most modern movie trailers can be viewed (movie trailers can be updated daily, weekly, or monthly). At the time of this writing when one uses the BD-LIVE streaming feature with The Young Messiah Blu-ray, a Christian movie trailer for “God’s Not Dead 2” can be seen along with some other secular movie trailers. Also on the main menu in the upper right hand corner of the screen a scrolling Universal movie ticker is on the screen that advertises secular movies from Universal Studios (another feature of BD-LIVE). This ticker can be turned off by going to the Blu-ray disc setup menu and selecting the off option.

All extra features are 1080P quality using the MPEG-4/AVC codec. The Deleted Scenes lasts 6 minutes and 52 seconds (lossy 2.0 Dolby Digital stereo 192kbps). The Making Of The Young Messiah lasts 10 minutes and 12 seconds (lossy 2.0 Dolby Digital stereo 192kbps). The audio commentary track was very interesting to listen too regarding topics like what changes were made to the movie when compared to the fictional novel called “Christ The Lord: Out of Egypt”. The audio commentary track uses lossy English 2.0 Dolby Digital stereo at 192kbps. For those consumers that own modern A/V receivers the audio commentary track is encoded in Dolby Pro logic. If one bitstreams the audio commentary track to their A/V receiver then a Pro logic flag will be detected and Dolby Pro logic IIx decoding will automatically be activated in a 7.1 speaker setup (or regular Dolby Pro logic II decoding in a 5.1 speaker setup) . Voices come out of the center channel and simulated surround sound out of the rear speakers, etc.

Conclusion

This Young Messiah movie mixes historical facts about Jesus childhood with fictional unbiblical events. Jesus healing and raising people from the dead as a young child is offensive to most Christians. According to scripture Jesus began his ministry and started performing his first miracles after he was baptized around the age of 30 years old. The movie would have been more easier to enjoy if those child miracle scenes where removed. At the same time I felt the storyline was boring and slow at times. One might want to rent this movie instead of owning it. There are many other Christian movies on the market that are more enjoyable to watch. The extra features were interesting especially the audio commentary which was excellent in quality. The picture quality and 5.1 lossless soundtrack was excellent. The combination of using 5K Red Epic digital camera source material with high bit rate MPEG-4/AVC encode on the Blu-ray disc resulted in a reference video quality that is outstanding.