Well, if you’re going to steal, steal from the best. The whitened streets of Susa evoke Minas Tirith, the White City (though the architecture is vaguely early Naboo), accented by distinctly Jacksonian aerial cinematography.
Haman makes his entrance on horseback amid ominous portents, in the company of black-swathed riders - I’m sure I heard Nazgûl screeches on the soundtrack.
Following the biblical story, Haman plots to exterminate the diaspora Jews in Persia, but is foiled by the courage and cunning of the heroine (Tiffany Dupont, Cheaper by the Dozen), whom King Xerxes (British pop star Luke Gross) makes his queen. Following a midrashic tradition, Agag becomes the ancestor of the genocidally antisemitic Haman (James Callis, looking oddly like Jesus). Samuel (O’Toole) kills Agag, but, in a non-biblical twist, Agag’s pregnant queen escapes. The king is Saul, who, despite Samuel’s orders to spare no one after conquering the Amalekites, allows King Agag to live. One Night with the King opens with a voiceover prologue flashing back hundreds of years, in which we learn of (a) the forging of a sinister metal trinket and (b) an ominous act of defiance by a king following a victory in battle that will have dire repercussions for ages to come. The apparent Peter Jackson influence doesn’t stop there. (The heroine even talks to the moth on a rooftop in the opening scene, like Gandalf atop Orthanc.)
The only lapse in production values is some glaring CGI, used for a couple of waterfalls and a white moth that seems to have flown in, along with Rhys-Davies and Noble, from The Lord of the Rings. Sets, locations and especially costumes are quite good, with the Persian setting adding some exotic Bollywood-esque flavor to the usual ancient Near Eastern nomad couture. If the success of The Passion of the Christ hasn’t yet sent the Hollywood studios scrambling to produce religiously oriented fare, it’s at least partly responsible for the interest in films like these that otherwise might have gone straight to video.Īs that suggests, One Night With the King, like Facing the Giants, has a distinctly made-for-TV vibe, notwithstanding the biblical film’s visual spectacle and a distinguished supporting cast including Lord of the Rings alums John Rhys-Davies and John Noble and Lawrence of Arabia costars Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif. One Night with the King, directed by relative unknown Michael Sajbel (whose credits consist of a few films for Billy Graham’s World Wide Pictures) and produced by Gener8Xion Entertainment (the company behind the apocalyptic Omega Code thrillers), comes to theaters courtesy of FoxFaith, 20th Century Fox’s new faith-and-family-values division. Facing the Giants was financed by a Georgia Baptist church, then picked up for distribution by Goldwyn.
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