Priest

After a day off playing World of Warcraft and ... more World of Warcraft, Evan and I went to see Priest. Priest is made my Screen Gems, a subsidiary of Sony. So some of the previews were well known (Transformers) and some not so much (remakes of Straw Dogs and Fright Night), and some on our list for later (Colombiana, starring Zoe Saldana, of whom I'm pretty sure I can watch in anything).

The movie itself starts with Priest (Paul Bettany) leading a small group of fighters into an underground warren, supposedly searching for something. One ambush later, some of them die, some of them escape, and one of them is left behind (Karl Urban). Then it gets into an anime-esque introduction sequence to the story. Humans and Vampires are two different races continually at war. Vampires are fast and strong. Humans have technology and daylight. They almost lose despite those advantages, before training a sect of fighters known as priests, who are specially trained vampire slayers ... sorry, hunters. They do there job incredibly well, and the war ends with the vampires kept in reservations (basically, giant reservoirs from which they can't escape). Being genre-savvy, the government (aka the church) disbands the priests before they can revolt. But the priests don't really have any civilian skill, so most of them do mindless labour.

We go back to live action as Priest goes about his day. He stops at an automated confession booth, revealing his sin of doubtful dreams, and is given his penitence and forgiveness. Also, we get the church's tagline "To go against the Church is to go against God."

Out in the boonies, Priest's brother's family is attacked. The husband is seriously injured, the wife killed, and the daughter (Lucy) kidnapped. The local sheriff (who's also in love with Lucy), informs Priest and invites him on a vampire hunt. After some waffling and a confrontation with the head of the church (who's going beyond willful ignorance into what I can only call Active ignorance), Priest sets out to recover his niece.

He's tracked by four other priests (who've been ordered by the church to bring him back, dead or alive), one of whom is played by Maggie Q (the Q stands for Quigley, so I can understand why she goes by an initial). It's implied that she (imaginatively named Priestess) and Priest have had a romantic relationship, despite the vows of chastity each priest takes.

Anyhow, she meets up with Priest and Hicks (the sheriff), while the other priests are killed by the head of this pack of vampires. Priestess teams up with Priest to take the bad guy down. They follow him to a train that's carrying a bunch of vampires to the city, intent on restarting the war. Action ensues.

The main problem I had with this movie is unoriginality. If you've seen Equilibrium, you've probably seen most of the setting. Blade Runner fills in the rests. Seriously: A totalitarian government trains a select group of religiously-named elite soldiers to do it's dirty work. Comes complete with symbol (Equilibrium had the four T's, which look a lot like the crosses that abound in Priest). Priest definitely has more overt religion, but even that's copied from the Bible, or Catholic tradition (Psalm 23, Hail Marys). Makes me wonder where this movie is set. The wild frontier indicates a midwest in the late 19th century, while the city indicates the future. The mix of both would indicate an alternative universe, but then where did all the Christian imagery come from? Did Jesus die to save the sins of alternate dimensions? (You bet he did!)

I liked what they did with vampires. Feral, sightless, not at all like were use too. More like beastly werewolves instead of people. I kept on thinking I had seen them before, though. It wasn't until I thought about it a while that they reminded me of the Geth in the Mass Effect games. Agile, leaping, sticking to walls. Pain in the butt to shoot. Good, but not original.

I didn't like the motorbikes. They're the main method of transportation outside the city. I get putting a mini jet-engine on one, just not on the front. It looks more like an air-intake, but that would blow the rider off. Instead, it just looks silly. I'm willing to give the film makers the benefit of the doubt and pretend they had to take the design from the comic book on which Priest was based.

The music was suitably gothic, but I'm not sure I'd like it outside of the movie. Some soundtracks are really fantastic at amplifying the movie, but don't sound so great outside of it (Lord of the Rings, Star Wars). Some music sounds great inside and outside the movie (Transformers, Pirates of the Caribbean). I think this is one will be the former.

The dialogue is a mixed bag. Some of it's trying to be very serious, or meaningful, or symbolic, and kind of falls flat. Some of it's ripped off from westerns, and I liked that ("I know the look on a man's face when he enjoys taking a life. That look comes easy to you." "It comes. Easy's got nothin' to do with it.")

Finally, the final action scene is competent, but not awesome. They had the chance for an epic martial arts fest, and went the close-ups and brawl route. But I guess that's what happens when two white guys fist-fight (and yes, I totally went there. Jet Li or Tony Jaa wouldn't have let such action stand without something suitably mind-blowing).

Now that I've slammed the movie enough, I really should pick it back up. While it does steal a lot, it steals from good movies. The worst that can be said about this movie is that it's competent. It's well rounded; solid. While there's nothing truly spectacular (except for size of the off-switch on gravity), it's all around good. So I'd say it's a Blu-Ray movie. Probably not the best Blu-Ray movie, but not the worst.