[The movie version of Jesus Christ Superstar is] in many ways odious and in all ways absurd….

[The] entire story is presented without any original point of view, the only slightly significant departure being Christ's virtually provoking and coercing Judas into betraying him so as to fulfill the grand design. But I doubt if, at this late date, that is likely to give rise to a new heresy or serious schism.

No, the offense is of a different order. It is, first, in the text, which is faithfully that of Tim Rice for the "rock opera," and translates the sublime prose of the gospels into witless doggerel. "Listen, Jesus, I don't like what I see / All I ask is that you listen to me," Judas expostulates with his master…. Jesus himself gives out with things like "Then I was inspired, / Now I'm sad and tired" and "My time is almost through, / Little left to do…." As Judas puts it to Jesus, "But every word you say today / Gets twisted round some other way," which will also serve as a fair description of Tim Rice's lyric-writing.

But if the words are all bad—sounding like the unholy writ of Edgar Guest in collaboration with Norman Vincent Peale—the music by Andrew Lloyd Webber is not all deafening commonplaces. Though it is not exactly the kind of rock you can build a church on—sometimes, in fact, it sounds like recycled Massenet—it does have its tuneful or rousing moments…. [The] supreme failure is the director's own for trying to fill in the vacuity of the material with desperate stratagems of montage and camera trickery, and by feverishly latching on to bits of contemporary relevance that no other cat would have dragged in. (p. 44)

Some six decades ago, the distinguished German aesthetician Konrad Lange accused the then nascent world film production of being in the hands of "semi-educated, aesthetically feelingless, ethically indifferent, in short, spiritually inferior people," and as one watches this movie, it would be hard to disagree. It is extremely doubtful even whether one can forgive them because, as the King James version had it, they know not what they do, or, as the present text prosaicizes it, they don't know what they're doing. (p. 46)