Audience Member
I don't care what they say, it was better than The Da Vinci Code.
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
02/11/23
Full Review
Audience Member
this had many similarities to The Divinci Code. The feel was the same. This was entertaining and it was even better than the Divinci Code in many ways. Good scenes, and creative. Powerful, good stuff.
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
01/22/23
Full Review
Audience Member
<div style="width:280px;"><a href="http://www.flixster.com/photos/revelation-12236182"><img src="http://content8.flixster.com/photo/12/23/61/12236182_ori.jpg" border="0"/></a><div style="text-align:center;font-size:10px;"><a href="http://www.flixster.com"> </a> </div></div>
<div style="width:280px;"><a href="http://www.flixster.com/photos/revelation-12236186"><img src="http://content8.flixster.com/photo/12/23/61/12236186_ori.jpg" border="0"/></a><div style="text-align:center;font-size:10px;"><a href="http://www.flixster.com"><I>Revelation</I></a></div></div>
<I>Revelation</I> (2001) (Not 2003; Flixster may have made an innocent oversight.)
Written and directed by Stuart Urban based on an idea by Frank Falco.
With Udo Kier, David Urban, and Terence Stamp.
Genre: Suspense? Thriller? Christian? Occult? Intrigue? It can't seem to find itself.
I am not a critic. For the most part, I don't like to criticize well made pop art that has any redemptive value. I hate critics, although I admit that critics are useful to me because I take confidence in the fact that I will enjoy any movie that mainstream critics condemn and vice-versa.
I do delight in writing my dreadfully amateurish little "reviews" for Flixster. I might throw in a critical comment when a given work missed a chance at a good plot turn, or if there's a section of a film that most of my Flixster friends might want to fast-forward through. One example might be the age-old cliche of the good guy cop bickering at length with his wife about how his long, odd hours keep him away from the family hearth. (God knows we must all be tired of that sort of cheap filler forced conflct.)
I'm going to make an exception here and issue a warning to serious occult fans. The descriptions of <I>Revelation</I> make it appear to be a fast moving, intriguing, imaginative film. I was expecting a cross between <I>The Exorcist</I> and <I>The Man Who Would Be King</I>. Here's a revelation for you: it is anything but. It is 111 minutes of murky, inconsequential, uninteresting, highly derivative pseudo-Christian mumbo-jumbo that goes absolutely nowhere. Worse, it goes nowhere slowly. Very slowly. With a <I>LOT</I> of talk. Yak yak yak yak yak. Talk talk talk talk talk.
The following is a foaming diatribe which you can skip. All you need to know if you are an occult fan is that if you were expecting the kind of viewing experience that I was hoping for when I read the promo for this movie then <I>Revelation</I> will be a bitter disappointment. If you think you may be mildly amused by my raving pontification as to <I>why</I> this movie sucks so, do read on.
OK, enough of that for the moment. Here's the plot, highly condensed and oversimplified. Good guys search for a very profound needle in a world sized haystack. Bad guys try to kill them and find it first. The fate of the world depends upon who wins. This is an often used formula that has led to some very exciting movies. However, as any standup comedian will tell you, "It's all in the delivery." <I>Revelation</I> becomes mired in the fine detail and lore of its own premise at the expense of action and an exciting conclusion.
<I>Revelation</I> is about two opposing factions of the Knights Templar/Masons descendants. We've seen and heard of all of the factual and fictional variations and characterizations of these "secret" societies in other movies [ooooh, do I hear eerie music?] Most of us have heard and read the associated urban legends and facts about these mysterious orders. The two sides in this particular representation compete to find an ancient and supremely, but inexplicably important artifact known only by the mysterious name, "the Loculus." (More eerie music, please.)
The more benign faction is relentlessly pursued by the evil faction. The two agents chosen to assist the "good" Knights in their quest for the Loculus are two twenty-somethings; a guy who conveniently happens to be the foremost cryptography specialist in the world, and a curvaceous girl who is a Ph.D.-level modern day "alchemist." Oh brother.
The Loculus harbors a profound secret, which if misused will lead to the end of mankind. The evil faction wants to abuse it, the benevolent faction wants to destroy it so that it will not be exploited.
<B>SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT!</B>
I'll cut to the chase. The artifact contains Christ's DNA, and the "bad guys" want to use it to artificially resurrect Jesus. However, they want to inject the Holy Embryo with the ruthless personality genes of the leader of the evil Knights faction, thus producing a test-tube Antichrist.
The movie shows some promise for good intrigue when it is revealed that the members of these two Knights Templar offshoot factions <I>also</I> happen to be clergymen and Vatican officials. During the pursuit of the well-intentioned faction by the malevolent one, many of the "good guys" are gruesomely impaled and burned, or skinned alive, medieval style upon being captured. This part sounds exciting, and it is, but there is precious little of it.
Unfortunately the movie bogs down. It contains too much extraneous detail which is too convoluted to follow. It is not worth one's effort to even try to track the fine nuances, because <I>Revelation</I> isn't clever or thrilling enough to make it worth the trouble to do so. One needs to be a multidisciplined scholar of theology to grasp the confusing intricacies of the storyline. If in fact the Christian history that it portends to be based on is factual rather than a blend of fact and fancy, the film might be of passing interest to theology doctoral candidates -but not to very many others.
One silly element of <I>Revelation</I> that tickles me are the conceptions of fictitious computer programs and electronic gadgets that work flawlessly. This observation is not central to my criticism of the plot, but kindly humor my digression. The protagonists rely heavily on cyber tech to triangulate the location of the Loculus. <I>I</I> can't even get Meebo to work properly half the time and I'm skillfully running two 64 bit dual processor Pentium 4 computers with a ton of RAM. Yet the miniaturized notebook computer used by the central protagonists can connect to the Internet from anywhere. It never needs its battery recharged (my laptop batteries are good for about ten minutes, the one in their micro-laptop would last about ten seconds). It runs sophisticated, resource-intensive programs that would require the latest dual processor Macintosh server. Despite these challenges, their microcomputer technology never fails, it never stalls, sputters, or hangs. Their operating system must be heaven-sent. It certainly works hundreds of times more efficiently than this joke on the public that we refer to as "Microsoft Windows."
<I>Revelation</I> presents some other practical stretches as well. For example, the protagonists' plethora of sophisticated gadgets always function perfectly in all environmental conditions, are ever at the ready regardless of circumstance, and never become lost, misplaced, stolen or broken, despite the fact that the two heroes are pereptually on the run.
Even more ludicrous, and central to the credibility of the story, is that with the malevolent Christian faction hot on their trail to torture, kill them and retrieve the Loculus, the two lead characters, having found the sacred artifact, stop in a public place to screw. That's right. Instead of drawing their weapons and running like hell from their enemies with the most valuable object in the world in hand, they stop and fornicate in a Christian tourist spot. Makes sense, right? That in itself would ordinarily be enough to get me to sit through this gabfest. However we don't even get a good voyeuristically cheap thrill from it because there's barely enough nudity or heaving and moaning to upset Jerry Falwell. Go figure.
Of course, due to the protagonists' inability to postpone gratification, the prize object is seized from them, and the villain appears to win the game when he successfully creates a fetal Antichrist, but we see nothing of the consequences in the movie. The film ends with a whisper, via the audacious suggestion that the two protagonists are so noble, that their sleazy, semi-public quickie has resulted in the second coming (no pun intended) of Christ, i.e. that the girl will give a not-so-virgin re-birth to the Christian savior. Got all this? Well that's it. That's all that happens.
No stunning climax, no Devil, no head-crunching, carnivorous demon, no witches, no sex rituals, no incubus, no succubi, no blood sacrifice, not even the ground opening up at our feet to reveal a bottomless, flaming pit to Hell. There is little but talk followed by an anticlimax. (Except for the girl's climax in the brief, nearly immaculate and sterile sex scene.)
Oh, did I mention that the bad Knights faction has some kind of unexplained, supernatural ghost-Crusader army that enables them to do what the writer couldn't provide a better device to accomplish? Regrettably, the phantom soldiers, while frightening, could be dispensed with as a plot device. Upon seeing this contrivance, I expected an addition to the storyline of some UFO's, Noam Chomsky walking on water, and the ghost of Alfred North Whitehead. They could have at least added to the silliness by claiming that backmasking in a Beatles song provides the key to understanding some forgotten, pertinent profundity of Process Theory.
The British make some of the best intrigue, horror and mysteries in the world. However they seem to have no clue how to make a gangster film, for instance. <I>The Krays</I> (1990) is a perfect example of this. Don't take offense, my Brit friends, we stupid Americans are the ones responsible for the horrid butchering of your splendid, <I>The Day of the Jackal.</I>. I don't even know how to categorize <I>Resurrection</I>. Whatever the heck it was supposed to be, like a gangster film, it falls into one of those few categories of movies that the Brits apparently just don't have a knack for producing. But then, anyone who saw the remake of Rollerball might draw the same conclusion about American sci-fi. <I>Revelation</I> appears to be an attempt to write the next <I>The Da Vinci Code</I>, crossed with <I>Cronos</I>. Crossed with <I>Inspector Gadget</I>. Crossed with <I>Waiting for Godot</I> and with the loquaciousness of <I>My Dinner With Andre</I>.
I have seldom seen a movie on such a high budget travel so far, so slowly, to arrive with so little point or purpose, on top of being rich in incomprehensible detail along the way, Even the gosh-darned endurance exercise in extreme tedium entitled, <I>The Cassandra Crossing</I> finally climaxed in a smashingly spectacular, bloody train crash at the end.
<I>Revelation</I> could have been a very good, non-supernatural intrigue film about Vatican corruption and double agents. It could have been a great occult mystery or thriller. It was neither. It should have been a fast paced, real-life cat an mouse story, with a compelling context and a shocking, supernatural topper. It wasn't that either.
<B>I WANT MY MONEY BACK! I WANT MY AFTERNOON BACK!</B> Unless you loved <I>The Da Vinci Code</I> and seek something more confusing and much slower, avoid this turkey at all costs. It was an extravagant waste of superb production values, fine actors, and fantastic locations and cinematography.
And here I gave a ho-hum review to the pedestrian "occult," grade-B camp flick, <I>I Drink Your Blood</I>. That was actually a much more entertaining film made for about 1/% of the budget of <I>Revelation,</I> This just goes to show that you can throw money at a good script, and it may result in a great movie. Throw lots of money at a crap script and you can make a movie with fine production values that is still crap.
<div style="width:120px;font-size:10px;text-align:center;"></div><a href="http://www.flixster.com/videos?videoId=11060738"><img src="http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/TqMyyRKsYvc/default.jpg" border="0" /></a><div style="font-size:10px;width:120px;text-align:center;"><a href="http://www.flixster.com"><I>Revelation</I></a> - trailer</div><div>
Rated 0.5/5 Stars •
Rated 0.5 out of 5 stars
01/25/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Very neat story, but hard to get into. Pretty much a poor man's relic hunting movie, like the Di Vinci Code or The Last Crusade.
Rated 2.5/5 Stars •
Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars
01/28/23
Full Review
Audience Member
My husband tortured me with this film yesterday afternoon. Thankfully, I had to run to the pharmacy before they closed so I was spared the last fifteen minutes.
Rated 0.5/5 Stars •
Rated 0.5 out of 5 stars
01/25/23
Full Review
Audience Member
it was ok for a jesus-based movie. amazing sets and locations. udo kier gets to wear a lot of costumes; roman general, templar knight, colonial american, catholic bishop, evil business man (which is just a suit).
Rated 2.5/5 Stars •
Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars
02/16/23
Full Review
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