Paradise Falls has seen better times.

Check that. For all we know, these might be the salad days for Paradise Falls—which boasts neither falls nor paradise. Little more than a gas station positioned in the middle of the desert like a pimple between your shoulder blades, Paradise Falls' clientele has mainly consisted of lost and weary travelers who straggled in once every couple of days or so. It's pretty remarkable how Bob Hanson, the embittered owner, managed to pay his three-person staff all these years.

But now that the apocalypse has come, Paradise Falls is getting a lot more traffic.

Alas, the folks who come around now are possessed interlopers who rarely bother to pay for their meals. They just tend to—well, take bites out of other diners and scamper across the ceiling, without so much as leaving a tip. Then, naturally, they have to be killed, and a dead customer is no good to anybody.

Then Michael skids into Paradise Falls in a stolen police car and explains why the place is getting a sudden influx of new business: God has had it up to here with humanity and has decided to snuff out His creation once and for all with a zombie horde that's possessed by … His angels. Michael knows all this, of course, because he's the angel Michael.

Check that. He's the ex-angel Michael who has tossed his badge down on his boss's cloud and ripped off his wings so he can fight against God's plan for man.

There's no time to explore this tangled theology, though, because the zombies are shambling their way up to the station right now—and they're not coming for the waffles. They're coming for a baby—the unborn waif being toted around by Charlie, the diner's chain-smoking waitress. That baby, Michael solemnly intones, has the capacity to save humanity. Only he has to be born first.

:: Review
"This is [director] Scott Stewart's interpretation of the way he sees the world and the way he sees certain verses in the Bible," actor Tyrese Gibson told Fox News. "It's his opinion, he's entitled to it. I was just happy to help him bring that vision to life, but that doesn't mean I see it the way he sees it."

How does Stewart see it? Well, for starters, Stewart's idea of God doesn't much resemble the real one, though Stewart would have you think it does. No, Stewart's template for the film's deity seems to have been Dilbert's pointy-haired boss—only with more wrath.

Consider the setup: God, sick of humanity, decides to destroy it. But rather than just flick our tiny planet out of orbit, sending it hurtling into the sun, he decides to send a few angels to possess a few folks and then sic them on other folks in a sort of a global grudge match. At the same time, God also sends a newfound savior (one delivered hurriedly on Christmas, no less) to save us. Then, apparently having second thoughts, he sends more angels to destroy that savior. But …

Well, you get the idea. "Certain verses" couldn't have even begun to inspire this bizarre, incoherent vision. Because, really, the only thing Legion seems to have taken from the Bible is its title, a couple of angelic names (Michael and Gabriel) and the words of Psalm 34:11, which are stamped onto the screen during the opening credits.

So allow me to assume a biblical tone for a moment: Woe to those who pay even scant heed to Stewart's underlying spiritual speculations: That questioning, nay, rebelling against God is about the best thing you can do, because God isn't just mean and vindictive, He's wrong. Let me repeat: In Legion, God is wrong, so rebellion is required.

Scripture tells us that our problems here on earth are caused by rebellion. But in Legion, rebellion is a great and honorable aspiration—and that's embodied by Michael, who tells everyone, "I'm following my own orders now." He denigrates Gabriel for being so "obedient," so "eager to please," and he claims that it was God who lost faith in His creation. "I didn't."

In the end, Michael is redeemed by God not in spite of his rebellion, but because of it. "You gave Him what He asked for," Michael taunts Gabriel. "I gave Him what He needed." The assumption: God, just like the rest of us, needs a critic.

For the record, there are no demons and there is no devil in Legion. And that makes me wonder: Did Stewart simply miss the obvious parallels between his Michael and the real Lucifer? Or did he just not have the courage to unveil this "heroic" angel for what he is?

You're still reading? Fine. I'll be even more blunt: This is one of the worst movies I've ever seen. It is so bad that it could kill monkeys. It is so bad that I'd recommend any cinema playing the thing to put baffles up so its badness doesn't somehow leak onto adjacent screens.

Legion is a film almost without merit on every level—from artistic to intellectual to spiritual. It left me feeling so sad, so sickened and so plain alarmed at its blasphemous, big-budget awfulness that I feel a sense of pity for everyone who worked on it. And for anyone who willingly watches it.

It's ironic, I think, that a film that seems to desperately want to make God's wrath look so terrible ends up making it seem rather small and ineffectual—as if Stewart believed that all the powers of heaven might only amount to something so silly as a zombie stampede. Bad, yes, but nothing a few misfits in Paradise Falls can't fend off over the course of a long weekend.

Thus, Stewart's vision ultimately does little to diminish the reputation of the real God, or His heaven and angels. Rather, it diminishes itself by way of fevered theological claptrap devoid of even an ounce of thought. Legion is nothing more than the reckless musings of someone who knows about as much about the Bible as I know about aeronautical engineering.

Email (will not be published)

Name

Title

Comment
 remaining characters

Post