+blog.jpg)
+dvd+blog.jpg)
reVIEW (40)
EXORCIST: THE BEGINNING
Renny Harlin is in a most unenviable position.
When the original director for the prequel to the classic horror film, The Exorcist, Paul Schrader, delivered a film that the studios deemed unhorrifying, Harlin was tasked to take the project over, basically starting from almost-scratch, with a reworked script, which of course, needed to be shot, all over again.
Never mind that William Friedkin’s harrowing The Exorcist is a particularly tough act to follow. Forget the fact that the first two sequels, Exorcist II: The Heretic (directed by John Boorman) and Exorcist III: Legion (directed by Exorcist author William Peter Blatty) aren’t exactly highly regarded in the annals of horror history.
There’s money to be made from the franchise, and besides, this isn’t a sequel (dirty word, that); this is the prequel, the story before the story.
Of course, with all that history before him (and replacing Schrader, a director who’s undeniably far better than he could ever be), coming into the game, Harlin’s already in the con column, but, to be perfectly fair, we need to see the film first, before making any judgments.
And in the end, as a film, it’s not as bad as one might expect. As a horror film though, it’s not very good.
Down to the brass tacks…
The year is 1949 and an ancient Byzantine church is discovered in the Turkana region of Kenya, a church that shouldn’t exist, in a place it shouldn’t be. Lankester Merrin (Stellan Skaarsgard) has turned his back on the Church and exchanged his priest’s collar for an archaeologist’s khakis (some dark secret that occurred during the war—a secret gradually divulged to us through a series of flashbacks running through the film—having caused him to lose his faith in God). But it is in his capacity as an archaeologist that he is called in to investigate the enigmatic church; a church that when uncovered, is pristine, as if it had been buried the instant construction was completed.
The premise itself is intriguing, and as one would expect, the church (like Merrin himself) has a deep, dark secret trapped within, awaiting the chance to emerge into the light.
What sets Exorcist: The Beginning apart from the sequels, is that it clearly aims to be more than “just” a horror movie, striving as it does to juxtapose the horrors of the Holocaust with the horror that embraces the African village as the story unfolds.
But it never truly succeeds in its lofty aim, in part because the Evil is never as all-encompassing and pervasive as William Friedkin was able to make it seem in the original Exorcist.
Mood and atmosphere are virtually non-existent here; what we have is just a straight-forward presentation of the cause-and-effect plot which appears in the script. It just never really feels like this is the ultimate Evil Merrin is facing.
Additionally, the script (four screenwriters are credited; never a good thing, that) doesn’t quite take the idea as far as it could go either. To have made some kind of statement about evil as external supernatural force as opposed to internal natural instinct, seems logical, given the milieu we are presented with, and yet, no point of that sort is made.
Even approaching the film from the angle of a story of a man’s redemption, of his rediscovery of his faith in the face of strife, it still doesn’t quite work. Given that we see Merrin as a priest once more in The Exorcist, his return to the Church is a foregone conclusion. And while the foundation of the spiritual crisis Merrin is faced with is indeed a weighty and potentially soul-shattering one, the moment(s) of conversion aren’t played out well enough for the resultant end to be credible.
Symbolism at this point gets a tad heavy-handed as well, as we see Merrin crawling through a tight tunnel, ending up in a womb-like cavern, which he then leaves through another tunnel, large enough now to stand in and walk down, all the while being obstructed by the possessed, as if the Devil were reluctant for this soul to be reborn into the faith. This particular sequence ends with Merrin digging his way out of the ground, transfigured by the crucible of evil he has just emerged from.
Symbolism 101, anyone?
In aiming high—and not quite hitting the mark—though, The Beginning also ends up neglecting the horror film side of itself, and save for a couple of disturbing shots of the possessed (achieved through CGI), and the parallel event that occurs in the village when Merrin uncovers the church’s secret, there aren’t much chills to be had here.
Even the locust imagery (one of the truly unsettling elements in the otherwise horrific mess The Heretic turned out to be) is abandoned, replaced by flies, hyenas, and ravens. (And with the hyenas, the CGI stumbles, so a sequence that might have been a high point of the film, turns out to be a rather mediocre affair.)
Ultimately, The Beginning could have been so much more, but is, when all is said and done, a film that attempts to be more than your regular run-of-the-mill horror movie, but is definitely not a landmark in horror cinema, the kind of film the original certainly was.
(Exorcist: The Beginning OS courtesy of impawards.com [design by The Cimarron Group]; DVD cover art courtesy of amazon.com.)
(The above is an altered version of a previously published review entitled “False Start.”)
EXORCIST: THE BEGINNING
Renny Harlin is in a most unenviable position.
When the original director for the prequel to the classic horror film, The Exorcist, Paul Schrader, delivered a film that the studios deemed unhorrifying, Harlin was tasked to take the project over, basically starting from almost-scratch, with a reworked script, which of course, needed to be shot, all over again.
Never mind that William Friedkin’s harrowing The Exorcist is a particularly tough act to follow. Forget the fact that the first two sequels, Exorcist II: The Heretic (directed by John Boorman) and Exorcist III: Legion (directed by Exorcist author William Peter Blatty) aren’t exactly highly regarded in the annals of horror history.
There’s money to be made from the franchise, and besides, this isn’t a sequel (dirty word, that); this is the prequel, the story before the story.
Of course, with all that history before him (and replacing Schrader, a director who’s undeniably far better than he could ever be), coming into the game, Harlin’s already in the con column, but, to be perfectly fair, we need to see the film first, before making any judgments.
And in the end, as a film, it’s not as bad as one might expect. As a horror film though, it’s not very good.
Down to the brass tacks…
The year is 1949 and an ancient Byzantine church is discovered in the Turkana region of Kenya, a church that shouldn’t exist, in a place it shouldn’t be. Lankester Merrin (Stellan Skaarsgard) has turned his back on the Church and exchanged his priest’s collar for an archaeologist’s khakis (some dark secret that occurred during the war—a secret gradually divulged to us through a series of flashbacks running through the film—having caused him to lose his faith in God). But it is in his capacity as an archaeologist that he is called in to investigate the enigmatic church; a church that when uncovered, is pristine, as if it had been buried the instant construction was completed.
The premise itself is intriguing, and as one would expect, the church (like Merrin himself) has a deep, dark secret trapped within, awaiting the chance to emerge into the light.
What sets Exorcist: The Beginning apart from the sequels, is that it clearly aims to be more than “just” a horror movie, striving as it does to juxtapose the horrors of the Holocaust with the horror that embraces the African village as the story unfolds.
But it never truly succeeds in its lofty aim, in part because the Evil is never as all-encompassing and pervasive as William Friedkin was able to make it seem in the original Exorcist.
Mood and atmosphere are virtually non-existent here; what we have is just a straight-forward presentation of the cause-and-effect plot which appears in the script. It just never really feels like this is the ultimate Evil Merrin is facing.
Additionally, the script (four screenwriters are credited; never a good thing, that) doesn’t quite take the idea as far as it could go either. To have made some kind of statement about evil as external supernatural force as opposed to internal natural instinct, seems logical, given the milieu we are presented with, and yet, no point of that sort is made.
Even approaching the film from the angle of a story of a man’s redemption, of his rediscovery of his faith in the face of strife, it still doesn’t quite work. Given that we see Merrin as a priest once more in The Exorcist, his return to the Church is a foregone conclusion. And while the foundation of the spiritual crisis Merrin is faced with is indeed a weighty and potentially soul-shattering one, the moment(s) of conversion aren’t played out well enough for the resultant end to be credible.
Symbolism at this point gets a tad heavy-handed as well, as we see Merrin crawling through a tight tunnel, ending up in a womb-like cavern, which he then leaves through another tunnel, large enough now to stand in and walk down, all the while being obstructed by the possessed, as if the Devil were reluctant for this soul to be reborn into the faith. This particular sequence ends with Merrin digging his way out of the ground, transfigured by the crucible of evil he has just emerged from.
Symbolism 101, anyone?
In aiming high—and not quite hitting the mark—though, The Beginning also ends up neglecting the horror film side of itself, and save for a couple of disturbing shots of the possessed (achieved through CGI), and the parallel event that occurs in the village when Merrin uncovers the church’s secret, there aren’t much chills to be had here.
Even the locust imagery (one of the truly unsettling elements in the otherwise horrific mess The Heretic turned out to be) is abandoned, replaced by flies, hyenas, and ravens. (And with the hyenas, the CGI stumbles, so a sequence that might have been a high point of the film, turns out to be a rather mediocre affair.)
Ultimately, The Beginning could have been so much more, but is, when all is said and done, a film that attempts to be more than your regular run-of-the-mill horror movie, but is definitely not a landmark in horror cinema, the kind of film the original certainly was.
(Exorcist: The Beginning OS courtesy of impawards.com [design by The Cimarron Group]; DVD cover art courtesy of amazon.com.)
(The above is an altered version of a previously published review entitled “False Start.”)
No comments:
Post a Comment