Some time back, I saw the trailer for the movie Priest. The trailer looked interesting, in a mindless action/adventure/horror sort of way.
I’d like to tell you that this was a good movie. But I can’t. The plot was the same as all the others. The characters were effectively non-existent except for the fact that they were present. The plot ‘revelations’ were anything but. Indeed, they were so predictable that it would have been more surprising had they not happened.
The action was, at best, mildly interesting. But it was not very imaginative and required much too much suspension of belief.
I can only describe this movie (and the main character) as the poor, red-headed step-child of a love triangle between James Bond, Neo, and Buffy Summers. It’s an utter waste of 90 minutes of your life.
SPOILER ALERT
But there was some interesting material in there. The history was completely different. I’m not sure if it was to be considered an alternate reality or what. And the vampires were… interesting. Bipedal in a completely improper way, they were blind and actually had some interesting vocalizations. I couldn’t tell if they were sentient or more like worker drones. The hive concept reinforced that a bit. A queen was mentioned but never expounded upon.
But I thought it really interesting that the people who became good at fighting the vampires were called priests. Several lines in the movie led me to think that the powers of the priests (rapid healing, speed, accuracy, strength, concentration, etc) were not granted by divine providence. Instead, it seemed like these ‘priests’ were superheroes and would have had their abilities with or without religion.
One of the characters seemed to have at least a few of the abilities of a priest, just untrained.
The church was shown as massively controlling. One reviewer on Netflix suggested that the city in Priest made LA in Bladerunner look like a resort on Nassau. I totally agree. Take all the worst aspects of 1984, Wool, and Bladerunner then throw in a theocratic based control system.
The absolute funniest thing in the whole movie was the confessional chamber run by a (poorly programmed) expert system that kept asking leading questions and (appeared to) randomly select a penance.
It reminds me of a very old book called Heiro’s Journey. The book was kind of similar. The main character was a priest, but I don’t recall any prayers. He was a psi. Back in the 80s when psionics were cool.
Again it appeared as if the powers and abilities were attributed to the person and only coincidentally was religion involved.
He book also dealt with powerful monsters (mutations from a nuclear war) and, also like the movie, wasn’t all that great.
In the movie, the church really ended up being the, sort of, bad guys. Of course, our hero broke faith them in order to do what was right. The church wasn’t so much bad guys as “don’t rattle the boat” guys. The leader of the church (Christopher Plummer in perhaps the only role with actual emotion) didn’t want the vampires to come back, so he ignored them. Perhaps he was power mad, perhaps he was scared, perhaps he was just tired.
Doesn’t much matter. The church, much like the church of today, controls the population and they don’t ask questions.
Anyway, if you have 90 minutes to waste with some friends and want to see a pretty abysmal movie, this isn’t a terrible choice. I’m not sorry I watched it, but I can’t recommend it.
