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The cinematography is nice in this movie; they take time to show scenery and changes in expression on actors' faces over several seconds of screen time. Taking a black-and-white setting then fading-in of color when they are depicting an apparition of Mary is a nice touch. The music is good for this movie. The movie has a lot of aspects that make it easy to watch, which is good when the unbecoming traits shown of some characters could be a turn-off if the movie didn't somehow make up for those things.
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Anyone watching this should know that it is not historically correct in many places. That's become rather expected in movies, since they take liberal license to change history in films just to allow the director more "artistic freedom" to make the movie superficially appealing.
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For example, they show flower-petal-like flakes drifting down from the sky after the Miracle of the Sun made a loud noise, and they show people reaching up to catch them as they fell. Well, there was no loud noise made by the sun, and there was no orchestra playing on October 13th, 1917. Those petal-like flakes did not fall that day, but rather they had fallen a month earlier on September 13th during the penultimate apparition. And when they fell, the petals never reached the ground nor was anyone able to touch them, as they individually vanished into thin air when they came close to being within reach of people. It is appropriate that no explanation or meaning is given to the falling petals because none of the children ever said they had understood what it meant, nor did they ask the lady in the vision to explain them. An informed viewer can recognize the depiction of those falling petals as a "flash-back" or memory of what had happened a month before, but superimposed on the moment the sun had appeared about to crash into the earth. As such, as an artistic element, it is actually quite creative and effective, but it should not be seen as the petals having really fallen just in that way nor precisely at that time.
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Another example is when they depict Jacinta lying in bed at the Lisbon hospital as she died: they show blood running like a tear from the corner of her right eye. Jacinta is not described anywhere as having "cried tears of blood" so it must be a poetic or symbolic visual effect the director was after there. They made no mention of the diagnosis of Doctor Castro Freire, "purulent pleurisy with fistula, osteitis of the 7th and 8th ribs" which necessitated the surgical removal of those 2 ribs, done without anesthesia. Instead, they say she died of influenza, which is not true. It was her brother, Francisco, who died from the flu epidemic of that time, but not Jacinta. She died from suffocation and infection, because breathing was very painful for her (pleurisy, or infection of the pleura, the membrane lining the lung cavity). Any photographs of her actual wound and superating side would have been a lot more gruesome that a single tear of blood. Although, in her last hours she was inexplicably free from the pain of her illness. The story of Jacinta's last days could be the topic for an entire movie of its own, so perhaps for simplicty's sake they reduced it to a few short and wordless scenes. They show her father visiting her there, but actually it was her mother who had come to visit shortly before Jacinta died, and it was true that she died with no one present as the movie shows. Jacinta had made a friend of one of the nurses in the hospital but the movie makes no allusion to that, nor of the wonderful intervention of Mother Godinho at the orphanage in Lisbon before Jacinta went in for her operation.
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There are a lot of details like that that are missing in the film, but other attributes of the movie are pretty impressive, such as the scenes in the holding cell where Jacinta dances with one prisoner and then the children start praying but end up with all the men in the jail praying along with them. That is part of the real record. It would seem that they were removed from the jail because their presence there was turning the men into holy prisoners, and the Ourem Administrator was afraid he would get in trouble for letting the place go to "ruin" if that kept up, since his Freemason boss had his own ideas about how a jail cell should be, and prayer was not on the list.
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