Sunday, January 31, 2010

if god were a nutter... (rated 3 stars)


I wasn’t expecting much from Legion, I was just looking to escape for a couple of hours. But it didn’t really do the trick. The movie is a monster/action fantasy. The monsters weren’t scary or novel enough to do anything more than gross me out in a few cases (I admit that I though that “grandma” was kind of a funny twist, but I’m not avidly into horror movies so maybe that’s been done to death).

And the premise was pretty ridiculous. First, we’re told there’s a God, and He’s fed up with humanity so He’s decided to get rid of every last one of us. So what does He do? He sends out angels to slaughter us. Angels! And the “angels” are acting a heck of a lot like demons, possessing some people, and taking bite-sized chunks out of others. Come on, angels behaving en masse in this evil manner?? So all plausibility is gone at this point, because if this is the way “God” behaves, then how do you differentiate him from Satan? Who, by the way, never appears once.

On top of that, the archangel Michael has decided to rebel against “God”. His reasoning? Father doesn’t know best. “God” should be given what he “needs,” not what he “wants.”

So basically, this “God” is either a psychopathic nutter or a giant megalomaniacal baby. Either way, it’s totally unbelievable because it’s so far out of the bounds of any mainstream Christian theology. If you’re going to propose a crazy-ass demon god, you should get him from some theology where that’s more plausible (ancient Egypt? The Greeks? The Aztecs?).

The reason that I’m rating the movie as “OK” is that it was a reasonable distraction, and I kind of liked the small cast of characters, even though they weren’t very well fleshed out (as is typical with horror movies). I don’t feel like the movie was a waste of time, although I do wish I’d seen something else instead…. If you’re going to watch it, do see it in the theater; I think I would have been more disappointed seeing it on a TV screen.

No comments: