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E-mailThe Bible tells us that the first time God lost faith in man, He sent a flood, and humanity only survived because of Noah and his Ark. But what if, next time, there is no Noah, no Ark… and what He sends is a host of bloodthirsty angels?
The plot of Legion is simple: God finally decided that humans have reached the lowest point that they could ever reach. Time for judgment day! But there are no earthquakes, no rain of fire and brimstone from heaven. Instead, he sends angels to possess, torture and kill the puny, evil, humans. Talk about hell being brought on earth. The only hope of humankind is an unborn child, whose only protector is a fallen angel. But the angel’s name is not Lucifer but Michael, the Archangel.
The gist of Legion immediately raises questions in the mind of anyone even vaguely familiar with the concept of God: “Isn’t God supposed to be the good guy?” “Aren’t angels supposed to guard you from harm?” Still, it was an intriguing notion... if only the execution wasn't so shoddy.
(Warning: Spoiler Alert)
Obviously, the angels of Director Scott Stewart are not the sort you see on Precious Moments greeting cards. Since it is crucial to the film’s major premise, Stewart reimagined these angels as God’s bloodthirsty soldiers, essentially making them no different from demons, or other supernatural cannon fodder such as zombies or vampires. They can only be stopped--not by chanting prayer or invoking scriptures--but by filling them with bullets, video game style.
The final battle of the movie is played out at a California desert diner appropriately called Paradise Falls . This is where we meet the main (human) characters: Bob (Dennis Quaid), his son Jeep (Lucas Black) and his friend Percy (Charles S. Dutton) stay. They are joined by the pregnant Charlie (Adrienne Palicki), lost traveler Kyle (Tyrese Gibson), and couple Sandra (Kate Walsh) and Howard (Jon Tenney) with their angst-ridden teenage daughter Audrey (Willa Holland).
When the motley crew of human survivors is not busy fighting off angel-possessed humans, they regale each other with stories about their past and what brought them there. Michael reveals that his original mission was to kill Charlie and her child, but he rebelled and turned his back on God to save them instead, believing that Charlie’s child is the hope of humanity.
Every character’s five-minute personal confession is supposed to reveal their deeper fears and motivations and move the story forward—but the creators seem to have forgotten a basic principle of story-telling: “Show don’t tell”. With such overuse of dialog, the movie stalls halfway through its 100-minute run time. I nearly walked out of the theater.
The film picks up steam with the arrival of the angel Gabriel on the scene, equipped with a fancy mace and metal wings that would have shamed Warren Worthington III (of X-Men fame). Why the angel Gabriel has metal wings is never explained—perhaps heaven experienced its own industrial and technological revolution. The ensuing confrontation between Gabriel and Michael can be enjoyable—assuming you forget the dialogue and focus on the cinematic flair with which they try to kill each other. As for the baby… well, given the way the movie was constructed, it shouldn’t surprise you to learn that it wraps up with a classic deus ex machina. Perhaps the creators believed that since divine entities actually plays a part in this story, they could get away with using such a tired narrative face-saving technique.
Legion had an interesting premise about God giving up on humans and sending angels to act as demons, and had the potential to actually raise philosophical ramifications, or spur debate between freethinkers and religious conservatives. But in the end, the movie should be judged on its cinematic merits, and Legion utterly fails to deliver a plausible story line. A hole or two in the plot would have been acceptable (this is a Hollywood action movie after all), but the sheer number present here sinks the movie, which falls far short of the potential of its premise.
It might be worth noting that Legion is Scott Stewart’s first full length film after working as the visual effects guru of such spectacular films as Iron Man, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest . Yet Legion is such a mediocre movie that I wish Stewart would stay in the visual effects studio and away from the director's chair.
(Image source: Wikipedia)
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