The historical figure is badly in need of resuscitation. Mention the upcoming film Luther here on the East Coast, and almost to a man everybody thinks it has to do with the fortieth anniversary of Dr. King's "I have a dream" speech, while few outside the Midwest will have heard of German Lutherans.

Set for September 26 release, this big-budget movie may bring about increased brand-name recognition but little else. If anything, the reality of Martin Luther within sixteenth century temporal and spiritual complexity is dumbed down beyond recognition.

Reduced ad absudum to advertising's "Rebel. Genius. Liberator," the young monk who shook Rome and altered the course of history, would seem another El Cid or William Wallace, an Emiliano Zapata, a Spartacus. Miscast from top to bottom, with sumptuous costumes meticulous but unintentionally funny -- check the headpiece on Holy Roman Emperor Charles V aka Carlos I of Spain -- the film goes awry from the first five seconds. Before the viewer can figure out that an arresting pattern is wet tree bark, a terrified man dedicates himself to God. This is not the Pauline "light from heaven" conversion, not Protestantism's traditional personal experience and calling; with no doubts, no mental struggle whatever, like Gargantua or Venus, the being who would change the world springs full-blown into that world.

Aside from three brief spells of physical and emotional wrestling with Satan in a dark monastic cell -- in historical reality, an outhouse -- Joseph Fiennes' character too effortlessly glides into each new rôle of many. Defiance of his pragmatic biological father is the first step; once started, after momentary shakes at his first Mass, he defies his Augustinian religious order, his university at Wittenberg, and his powerful protector there; on to defy two Popes, various cardinals, nuncios, soldiers, armies, princes and his Emperor. Just as easily, he becomes a translator of both Testaments who will greatly affect his native language, a formidable fighter (albeit torch- rather than sword-wielding), and a persuasive speaker and writer-pamphleteer. With no preparation either for him or the audience, he will shyly charm and marry out of the blue a nun thrown in his path and, as end-titles summarize, father six children.

Abuses within the Church had long been targeted by theologians and lay critics alike -- Florentine Dante, Chaucer in England, Gallic contemporary Rabelais -- and Luther's original quarrel was essentially with only certain limited excesses and doctrinal matters. The dramatic posting of the 95 Thesis on the castle church door -- a common bulletin board -- coincident with dissemination of his reform ideas through Gutenberg's new movable-type press, placed him in the spotlight of seething social, economic, political, as well as religious, unrest. Over a decade punctuated by confrontations with papal and imperial authority, Luther refined and expanded his doctrines, although his repudiation of their violent consequences in the Peasants' War of 1524-26 contributed to massacres of the poor and increased repression.

The physical and spiritual torments and anxieties of Luther the man are relatively well documented -- even psychoanalyzed, in Erik Erikson's recommended Young Man Luther. Historical background of the period is admittedly difficult, but, while a film seeks broad appeal, the Camille Thomasson-Bart Gavigan script manages merely to betray, oversimplifying the man and the era without at all clarifying. Aside from some vague idea that, way back when, a robed monk objected to some overdressed, bejeweled churchmen and nobles, we cannot say much, not even who's who, without a program.

Among the film's shortcomings, Fiennes is entirely wrong as the privately agonized, publicly poised central figure. Wooden-faced beneath designer stubble, he appears a tonsured charmer and effective lectern and pulpit comedian. Also distressing is Peter Ustinov, at eighty-two reduced to mischievous winking mannerisms as the Wise Prince. Sir Alec Guinness shone as England's doomed Charles I in another pseudo-historical stinker, Cromwell, while forty-three years ago Ustinov himself shone among many lights in Spartacus, but in the present instance even Sir Peter succumbs to Hollywoodian hashed history.

(Released by R.S. Entertainment Inc. and rated "PG-13" for disturbing images of violence.)