Boy, is Mel Gibson gonna be peeved!

Even now, in my sixth decade of moviegoing, I sometimes walk out of a theater - stumble might be a better verb - without a clue about what I have just seen. That happens during Tim Allen and Michael Bay movies, for sure, but it can happen with works by some of the world’s most talented filmmakers.

Take Alejandro Amenabar , for example. The Chilean-born director of, among other things, “The Sea Inside” (which earned Javier Bardem an Oscar nomination), “The Others” (a great ghost story starring Nicole Kidman), the original “Abre los ojos” and a little stunner titled “Tesis,” is a talented guy. But even talent can’t make something as unfocused as “Agora” seem the slightest bit intelligible.

I saw “Agora” last night at another one of the English-language screenings at Firenze’s Odeon. And while I can say that I’ll always enjoy sitting in the grandeur of that stately movie house, I can’t say as I enjoyed Amenabar’s film all that much.

Amenabar, who coworte the film with his longtime writing partner Mateo Gil, gives us the story of Hypatia (Rachel Weisz), a philosopher/mathematician/astronomer from 4th- and 5th-century Alexandria. According to Wkiipedia, among other sources, Hypatia was a fascinating character - someone who broke barriers that even modern women have trouble denting. She taught, she lectured, she researched and she wrote, all during a time when the world was turning toward the kind of fundamentalist religiosity that would shape history up to the present day.

There’s a great story here, but Amenabar can’t help but sentimentalize it. He takes at least two real-life people from the time - the Bishop of Ptolemais (Rupert Evans) and the Imperial Prefect Orestes (Oscar Isaac) - and makes them pupils of Hypatia. He adds in a third, likely fictional character, the slave Davos (Max Minghella), just to make the story even more confusing.

The movie is set at a time of great change, when religious fervor is fueling trouble between the growing strength of Christianity, the old-school pagan worshippers and the Jews. The Christians, backed by the firebrand Patriarch Cyril (Sami Samir), respond to force with even greater force. And, sensing their growing power, they push out the pagans, brutalize the Jews and work hard at making the declining Roman officials - namely Orestes - bow to their will.

As Amenabar and Gil tell it, their bargaining chip is Hypatia, the woman the Christians call a witch. And you know what early Christians tended to do with witches.

All this is well and good. But Amenabar directs his film as if it were an HBO miniseries that had been edited from a seven-week run to a two-hour-seven-minute, feature-release running time. Periods of years are glossed over with on-screen narration. And whiloe some characters grow up to become Imperial leaders, others - Weisz’s Hypatia to be specific - look as if they don’t age a day.

Particularly strange is the film’s insistence of confusing her various disciples’ ardor with that of romance, so much so that if feels as if all these great changes in history are caused by little more than aborted adolescent lust.

And then there are the scenes that end with Amenabar drawing his camera high into the heavens, as if he were trying to capture the eye of God - or the apathy of the larger universe - staring down on the pathetic movements of all these little characters, strutting like so many army ants with just about as much understanding of the larger realm around them. Groovy.

Weisz doesn’t help. While the role of Hypatia needed the strength and glamour of someone such as a young Helen Mirren or Emma Thompson to work, Weisz plays Hypatia as some sort of breathless Middle-Eastern Ms. Wizard, coming to conclusions about the working of heavenly bodies that folks such as Kepler wouldn’t figure out until a millennia later. Weisz deserved her Oscar for “The Constant Gardener,” and she was decent eye-candy for the first two “Mummy” films. But she feels here as if she’s auditioning for the lead in a middle-school production of “Annie Gets Her Gun” meets “Evita.”

Amenabar clearly wants to make a statement about how early religious leaders of all stripes, but particularly Christians such as Cyril, squelched as much as they could the teaching of Classic Greek thought. To his credit, he does show that the battle for supremacy wasn’t all one-sided when it came to using violence (the pagans, in this film, actually wield the first blade). And if history didn’t back him up in this, then we have virtually every religious movie ever made - from “The Kings of Kings” to “The Passion of the Christ” - to use as reference points.

“Agora” debuted at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival. It’s opened all around the world, though only on a limited basis in the U.S. Hard to say when, or if, it will ever play Spokane. But if it does, you might be interested in going.

If nothing else, it’s unique to see a film where the early Christians are depicted as the villains. I don’t think Mel Gibson’s going to be any too happy about that.

Below : The trailer for “Agora.”