"Assassin 33 A.D." is the psychotic fever dream hatched by that guy in your high school English class who never brushed his hair and intentionally mispronounced words because he thought it was cool, if that guy was also a regular churchgoer who watched OAN constantly.
Yes, it's the kind of sci fi that only someone with the faintest cursory knowledge of the concept of time travel and the story of Jesus could hatch after a few hits of LSD and a psychotic post-baptism breakdown.
The film opens on a man named Brandt, who will come to hate Jesus and God because his wife (Heidi Montag) and children die in a car accident as they are driving to their new home, and Brandt's new job. See, he is ex-military--he described his job to his wife as "killing terrorists"--who is now the head of security at a company owned by a guy named Ahmed Ahkbar (Gerardo Davila), who couldn't be more obviously a Muslim Extremist if he wore a "Death to Infidels" t-shirt.
But Brandt isn't really the movie's main character. That falls to Ram Goldstein (Morgan Roberts), an atheist scientist who reminds everyone at regular intervals that he doesn't believe in God, because this is important to the plot. When trying to create a machine that teleports things, "Star Trek" style, Ram accidentally creates a time machine. Of course, this was the hope all along, which allows the Muslim extremists to hatch their true plan--to assassinate Jesus Christ (played by Jason Castro, whose claim to fame, I understand, is being on American Idol)...before he is killed by the Romans.
Their goal is to prevent Christianity from ever becoming a thing, so that Islam...can be the world's preferred religion...I think? It's hard to tell, because this faith-based movie devolves into a series of sequences of modern soldiers firing automatic weapons at Jesus, his disciples, and Ram and his buddies, who decide to stop these horrible criminals.
This is the kind of film where, amid a crowd of random olive-skinned people wearing robes, our modern-day heroes instantly pick out Christ. When he's mowed down in a hail of gunfire, SAVING JESUS becomes the protagonists' sole It's also the kind of film where a guy's boss goes from "hey! you are going to be rich beyond your wildest dreams" to "I'm going to murder your parents if you don't give me what I want" in literal seconds of screen time. Keep in mind, all of this happens BEFORE the film devolves into a twisting trail of dead bodies, where everyone in the film dies more than once, only to be brought back into the narrative, because, you know, time travel.
An aside: do you think that if a time traveler dies and goes to heaven, if he dies AGAIN later on due to changes in the timeline, does he go to heaven again? In this film's universe, are there four or five versions of these characters in heaven chatting with each other? Further, is it then possible to be in heaven AND hell, if, say, that alternate version was evil?
This is ALSO a film where people who are angry or disbelieving of God will say so angrily, to his face, even, say, maybe as he's dying on the cross in front of their very eyes. And yes, we still see this, along with people helping Jesus on his famed walk with the cross, and a variety of other bizarre sequences that threaten to mess up the timeline so much, Doc Brown would have a heart attack.
"Assassin 33 A.D." is a surreal movie experience, one that I can't in good conscience recommend to anyone save fans of schlock cinema. It clearly does not hold the values that it's choosing to espouse, and the often vicious murders that take place over and over and over, some characters dying violently and repeatedly, is meant to shock and titillate, not uplift and inspire. in particular, one character (one of the film's good guys) murders another through a recreation of the stabbing scene in "Saving Private Ryan," where the killer is putting his weight on the knife while the victim struggles to prevent himself being stabbed, as the knife slowly enters his body.
Buuuuuttt...if you're a fan of train-wreck cinema, and hold the same general contempt I do for faith-based cinema, you might find yourself deriving the same perverse joy I did out of watching it.
Just don't say I didn't warn you.