The Prophecy

#4 - The Prophecy

 

 

 (Spoilers in both Summary and Review)

SUMMARY (courtesy of IMDB, edited by Elise)

The angel Gabriel comes to Earth to collect a soul which will end the stalemated war in Heaven, and only a former priest [now turned cop] and a little girl can stop him.

REVIEW

This movie is incredibly unconventional, and goes off into that strange world of dark theology.  However, there is something about it that is compelling in my mind.  With an all-star cast including Eric Stoltz, Christopher Walken, Elias Koteas, Virginia Madsen, and a special guest star of Viggo Mortensen at the end, I was pulled into an intriguing and fascinating movie about a second war in Heaven that had not yet ended and was still being played out on Earth using certain people as pawns.

Rated R for its’ graphic nature at times, I was still compelled to see it a second time recently, and found myself trying to look at it from an artist’s perspective, and I found something rather fascinating about it.  Though it was made in the early nineties, it had the feel of a movie that was made much more recently.  The only thing that showed its origins were the graphics used, which were obviously early nineties.

The most fascinating aspect of this movie was the casting.  Christopher Walken is known for portraying villains and slippery types of characters, so in this movie one would expect him to portray a demon, or at least an evil angel...but he portrays Gabriel, one of the most holy of angels.  In an unexpected twist of artistry, Walken portrays Gabriel as being someone who wants to be noticed by God once more because he feels he’s being passed over.  With his hair dyed black and dressed in a long black trench coat, he becomes a figure that we are scared to see because of the strange stark contrast of his pale skin with his hair.  It is obvious that he is a being not of this earth, and I must applaud the leading artistic directors of this movie for taking the risk in portraying Gabriel in such a way.

 

Near the end of the movie, we have a special guest star of Viggo Mortensen.  He portrays some fallen angel, of that we are sure, but this fallen angel saves the world from falling into inevitable chaos by taking the soul that belongs to him that Gabriel is trying to release…and we then realize who he is: Lucifer.  Mortensen brings a certain artistry to portraying the most villainous villain that can ever be portrayed, and I honestly think that he should have gotten an award for the brief part that he played in this movie.  He is beautiful, cunning, artful in using his words, and just when we start to think that he’s not so bad, our minds forgetting who he is, he slips back into his true purpose and tries to drag down our surviving characters with him, but of course is not successful.

 

 

 All in all, I would give this movie a ten out of ten, simply because of how they portray each individual character in relation to the whole.  There is a unique feel about this movie, however dark it may be at times, that seems to me to be a completely original portrayal of angels and unique perspective on theology.