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Lebanon Movies

Immortals Censored in Lebanon

immortals movie censored in lebanonYesterday night I went to the movies to watch Immortals with a couple of friends. The movie is good and I guess you’ll like it if you’re into this kind of movies. Here’s the description of the movie from IMDB.

Theseus is a mortal man chosen by Zeus to lead the fight against the ruthless King Hyperion, who is on a rampage across Greece to obtain a weapon that can destroy humanity.

In the middle of the movie, my friend noticed that there was a cut in a scene. The music suddenly stopped and a new scene started. A sentence said by a character in the next scene confirmed our suspicion that something was missing and in the end of the movie it became clear that the movie was censored so I decided to download the movie and check if it was true. It is, 2 minutes of the movie is missing in Lebanese cinemas!

Note that there will be spoilers in the rest of the article so keep reading only if you watched the movie or do not wish to watch it.

Unfortunately the censored scene is a key part of the movie. When the virgin oracle helps Theseus recover after he had buried his mother and fought for the bow, and while she is leaning at him the scene is cut in the Lebanese version. In the normal version, they kiss, she then stands up, removes her dress, and join him into bed. At this point her “behind” shows on camera. She then tells Theseus that her visions are a curse and she wants to see the world through her own eyes, her own flesh. We can then see there shadows making love and the scene fades out.

What’s weird about the censorship in this movie is that what is censored normally appears in other movies shown in Lebanese Theaters, so I am not sure why exactly this one was censored. My friends and I suggested 3 theories:

  1. That’s just Lebanon, consistency in censorship is not required.
  2. The Oracle should remain a “Virgin” so maybe they somehow linked it to Christianity.
  3. They just censored it so the movie could be rated PG (Lebanese standards). If that’s true it means the Lebanese censorship bureau (or whatever it’s called) doesn’t have any problem with violence and people killing each others, the important thing is that they should never kiss!

People in surrounding countries used to enjoy watching movies here because they are not censored! Now are movies are started to be censored! I hope whoever censors stuff around here realizes soon that we should be having less censorship (Ideally no censorship, just ratings) as the world evolves not more!