Jesus VR: The Life of Christ VR review: blandly biblical

Many 360 videos take viewers to far-flung locations to witness cultures far removed from our ordinary lived experience. Here it comes with the added novelty of using the medium to explore the story of Jesus Christ—offering, as one publication put it, “a virtual reality experience at the foot of the cross.” Premiering at the 2016 Venice Film Festival in the form of a single 360 video with a 40 minute running time, which was billed as VR’s first full-length movie, Jesus VR: the Story of Christ was later released as a 56 minute experience divided into six chapters, with a slightly different title: Jesus VR: The Life of Christ.

My colleague at The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw—who usually critiques traditional films—reviewed the former version in 2016, awarding the production four stars despite describing the acting as “dire,” the direction “awful” and the adaptation “conservative and pedestrian.” A considerable focus of his critique involved coming to terms with what Bradshaw called “complete wraparound 360-degree virtual reality.” The critic’s reflections on the novelty of being able to adjust his gaze and look in any direction identifies the important challenge of how to visually direct an experience in a 360 environment.

Bradshaw highlighted this—as well as the novelty factor of VR—when he wrote: “As the wise men presented their gifts to the baby Jesus during the nativity scene, I spin round to be confronted with a large, placidly chewing cow. During the John the Baptist scene, I turned out to watch some people at the far edge of the water, busily and continuously doing – what? I couldn’t quite see. And during the sermon of the Good Samaritan I found myself watching two actors pretending to fix a cart at the edge of the crowd.”

But a more interesting comment, in the context of visual configurations, comes from the sentence that opens his second paragraph: “The camera position is fixed and so are you.” From the opening scene in Jesus VR, which takes place at night, the viewer is placed in a central position. Immediately in front of us lies a black dark space, the absence of visual information encouraging us to scan other parts of the tableau. To the left is a village with the Star of Bethlehem above it; to the right a small group of people approach, walking close to the camera. One observes that “the star is getting brighter,” to which another responds: “yes, soon we will be in the presence of our Saviour, Christ the Lord.” 

Shortly later, when they arrive at a stable where Jesus was born, the camera is again in a central position, a roughly even amount of space in every direction. To the right is a fire; to the left a baby sleeping on a hay-lined manger. When filmmakers flocked to VR in the lead up to and around 2016—the first year headsets become available on the mass market—to try their hand at 360 videos, many went heavy with this basic configuration (the camera being in a fixed central position). Some experiences pull this off more engagingly than others. But often the approach felt quite staid and unadventurous, as it is in throughout Jesus VR—which follows the expected narrative beats of Christ’s life, from birth to crucifixion and resurrection. 

Despite the spatial evenness of the compositions throughout the experience, it’s always clear, after a quick surveying of the tableau, where the viewer is intended to look (most commonly towards humans who are either speaking or performing significant physical actions). Bradshaw’s observation of a cow in the nativity scene, and people located towards the edge of the water during a moment with John the Baptist, clearly arose from a decision to ignore the content creator’s intention. The critic comes close to acknowledging this in this review, writing: “I was filled with the weird, paranoid urge to turn my back on the main action and check that reality really was carrying on as normal.”

Even so, it’s an inevitable response. Place a person inside a 360 VR experience that displays visual information all around them, and they will turn their heads. The idea of viewers doing so only when a content creator intends them to is absurd. They’ll inevitably look in a less than ideal place—potentially many times. The tendency for artists such as Hansen to engineer simplistic visual arrangements with obvious points of focus resulted, paradoxically, in bland compositions that make the viewer want to turn their heads to create a more interesting experience, loosening their grip on the narrative. This lesson, while obvious in hindsight, was hard-learnt, ascertainable only through experimentation. Productions like The Life of Christ won’t age well, but their failures and limitations helped advance the grammar and syntax of a nascent medium.