Alright, time to start the slow crawl towards regular blogging again. And just for the fun of it, along with the regular silliness, I think I’ll get things going with some brand new silliness as well. Now, as odd as it may seem, I almost never go to the movies. I’m finally old enough that trying to watch a film in an auditorium full of drunk teenagers and half a dozen people using cell phones just isn’t worth the twenty bucks anymore. And besides, I just spent what few spare minutes I had this last week scouring the Internet for a 1978 made-for-TV Rankin and Bass production called The Bermuda Depths (an unexpectedly good film about a giant sea turtle and a girl with glowing green eyes), the only extant copy of which seems to be a rip some guy made from an old Betamax tape he recorded off TV back in the late 70s. Do I really sound like the target market for what Hollywood is churning out these days? Still, even though I’ve become a wait-for-the-DVD kind of guy, I do love me some trailers, and thought it would be fun to talk about some of the ones that catch my interest from time to time.
And I can’t think of a better one to start with than Legion, a movie not scheduled to be released until January 2010, but whose trailer just hit the web today. Now, be warned, this is a Red Band trailer, which means it can only be played before R rated films, and so contains a fair amount of coarse language and bloody violence. But if you have the stomach to watch it, you’ll understand why the subject matter is tailor made for this blog.
So, what do you think, huh? The plot’s appears to be pretty much a reworking of the Christopher Walken vehicle The Prophecy (1995), the gun toting angel is straight out of Gabriel (2007), and the money shot, the wall crawling grandma, is just a CGI enhanced version of the one we already got in The Exorcist III (1989). Worst of all, the theology is straight out of Kevin Smith’s Dogma (1999). In other words, complete bull kaka.
Angels changing allegiance after the fall? It’s pretty obscure theology, but that can’t happen.
God gives up on mankind out of disgust and calls the whole “covenant” deal off? By definition, God IS Good, so he can’t become the bad guy. Can’t happen.
But if He did decide to switch sides (which can’t happen) and become a liar and murderer, apparently He would still feel obligated to play by some kind of rulebook which contains a means by which a bunch of oafs in a diner can defeat God? What part of the definition of omnipotent do these guys not get? Can’t happen.
And best (or worst) of all, the whole plot seems to hinge on the second birth of the messiah, which God intends to stop. Yeah, God is going to try and abort Jesus. He’s pro-choice, who woulda guessed? Do I really need to say it? CAN’T HAPPEN!
Okay, obviously, this is just another story where the writers have approached certain elements of Christianity as just another bunch of fairytales to mine for ideas. There’s no real attempt going on here to be biblically accurate. Heck, there' doesn’t appear to be too much effort going on to be coherent. So that’s why I’m a little mixed on what to think about the trailer. On the one hand it’s a little irritating because I know some of the kids in my RE class are going to go see it, bring it up, and argue that it makes sense and could happen. Trust me, I’ve already had to listen to it with Dogma and Constantine. And if the church kids are buying into it, just imagine how much crappy theology is sinking into the heads of the non-church goers out there. (God can become a sociopath? Duh, why not?) But on the other hand, it’s hard to get too upset over this kind of story because, well, it’s just too stupid to take seriously. Most of the kids are going to forget all about it by the time they get to Taco Bell. And since it’s coming out in January, typically a time where the studios dump their filler product, there’s a 90% chance it will quickly disappear and be gathering dust on video store shelves by February anyway.
At which point I’ll probably rent it. Why lie?
So, any of you going to see it?
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