St. Peter's and the Papal Basilicas of Rome 3D (2016) User Reviews

Spectacular Buildings of the Vatican

[marklear-1 · 6/10 · 24 June 2016]

This documentary covers four iconic buildings of the Catholic Church . It begins with an interesting introduction involving Pope Francis ceremonially opening doors, and then goes on to describe each of the churches in more detail, including historical information, distressing events in their history (such as fires) and an unguided tour of each of them. The buildings are very empty when we go through them, so we have access to all parts of each of them. (In fact, you hardly ever see any chairs/pews at all.) The camera-work is critical to the success of this type of film, and, unfortunately, it is quite mixed. The actual images are crystal clear, and there is no use of shaky hand-held photography. It is more that there is very little variety in its presentation. We have a mixture of aerial shots of each building as our helicopter flies over each district, then we seem to do almost the same thing inside the buildings. It means that we never linger very long over anything, zooming in or out to the next ceiling or tabernacle or fresco, etc. The narration is also mixed - I saw the film in English, and the male narrators were, like the cinematography, lacking in variety of expression. The female narrator was more engaging. The outside aerial views of the districts are interesting, but the interior work does not do justice to the subject matter, in my opinion.