reVIEW (41)
DOMINION:
PREQUEL TO THE EXORCIST

After Paul Schrader’s Exorcist prequel failed to impress studio heads, the film was shelved, and Renny Harlin was brought in to come up with a new version, Exorcist: The Beginning (see reVIEW (40) in the Archive).
But after The Beginning failed to impress audiences, Schrader’s Dominion made the festival rounds, where the critics embraced it, eventually leading to a limited theatrical release.
And after I got to see it, it was obvious that this was the better of the two prequels.

Opening in Holland in 1944, Dominion: Prequel To The Exorcist kicks off with a harrowing sequence that serves to establish why Lankester Merrin (Stellan Skaarsgard) has strayed from the faith. We then pick up years later, as Merrin (on “sabbatical”) is excavating an ancient church which seems to have been buried just as soon as it was completed.
For anyone who’s seen The Beginning, this is the same basic premise found there, though in Harlin’s version, Merrin’s wartime trauma is parceled out as a series of flashbacks running the course of the film.
In hindsight, it’s clear what the studio heads chose to do with Schrader’s Dominion: inject traditional horror elements into the narrative, a gambit that still failed in my eyes, as I point out in my review of The Beginning that it “… ends up neglecting the horror film side of itself.”

See, I honestly don’t think Schrader (and screenwriters William Wisher, Jr. and Caleb Carr; yes, that Caleb Carr, author of The Alienist) intended Dominion to be a horror film in the traditional sense. In point of fact, it isn’t even a horror film in some of the senses that The Exorcist is a horror film.
That theme of evil as external supernatural force as opposed to internal natural instinct, the juxtaposition of the horrors of the Holocaust with the evil that embraces the African village, things that I felt The Beginning could have explored but didn’t?
Well, they’re all here. Apparently, they were diluted and dispersed in the transition to The Beginning. There are some provocative themes and ideas in Dominion, and they’re delved into in a satisfying and adult manner.
Aside from what I’ve mentioned above, Dominion also underscores the manner in which an alien entity (whether a foreign military presence or foreign religion) can exacerbate a local problem. There’s also an excellent sequence towards film’s end that suggests that any large-scale public display of violence is merely the symptom of an internal struggle with evil.
Merrin’s re-conversion here is also more palpable and logical, without the heavy-handed symbolism resorted to in The Beginning.

Now, after what—if memory serves me right—is my third viewing of Dominion, what occurs to me now that didn’t years ago when I first saw it is, Why did the studio heads greenlight Dominion in the first place, only to shelve it and cobble up the Frankenstein’s Monster that was The Beginning?
It had to have been all on the page in the screenplay, didn’t it? The veritable non-existence of traditional horror film elements in the narrative, the final confrontation as philosophical and moral debate? These and other bits like it that scream, This is not a horror film the way most people define that term.
They had to have seen it as early as then, and still they went through with it, only to back-pedal and shelve the film, then to back-back-pedal and release it anyway, all the while spending more and more money.
And admittedly, Dominion isn’t as scary as The Exorcist. In the end though, neither was The Beginning.
What’s particularly damning at this point is, at least Dominion didn’t even attempt to operate on the exact same playing field as The Exorcist, which The Beginning was possibly aiming for with its botched infusion of horror movie stylings.

In the end, Schrader’s Dominion is a fascinating treatise on the nature of evil, and God and man’s positions in relation to that evil, a treatise that just happens to be set in the world of William Friedkin’s The Exorcist.
It’s also an effective back story for the character of Lankester Merrin, a disturbing snapshot of his first encounter with Pazuzu.
And ultimately, that’s what a prequel is. A back story.
Not another excuse to make some more money off a franchise that shouldn’t have been one in the first place.

(Dominion: Prequel To The Exorcist OS courtesy of impawards.com.)

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.”)