Legion

Seen at: Carmike 5 in Greeley, Colorado, 4:05 p.m last Tuesday.

The slog continues through the end times. Last year it was Holocaust movies. This year it has been the apocalypse. How many times do I have see the end of the world being played out on screen. This has certainly been the bleakest stretch of Hollywood cinema of all time, thematically speaking.

For this particular entry, I journeyed over to Greeley to the Carmike there, finally plugging the last hole in the theaters of northern Colorado. The Carmike 5, I learned, is definitely the oldest theater in Larimer or Weld county, and it shows by its shabbiness. But the staff was friendly, and dutifully filled up a bag of popcorn for me for a dollar, being that Carmike has "stimulus Tuesday" with reduced concession prices.

Are movies so bleak because of the Great Recession, which began about the time this latest crop would have been in production? I think not. Readers of my reviews will remember that I am huge fan of movies from the early and and mid 1930s---horrible economic times---and that Busby Berkeley is at the top of my list of favorite directors. Movies from that era are bursting with life and optimism, even as they display a consciousness of how hard things are for most people.

Something else is at work to produce this bleakness, and to create this new genre in which every month it seems, we get to see civilization, or sometimes the entire Earth, destroyed. Where can it go from here?

Legion is perhaps the most ham-fisted of this new genre, with a laughable and at times downright pathetic literal interpretation of Biblical mythology (on par with Percy Jackson's Zeus creating lightning with his thunderbolt). In this case, it's angels---familiar ones, like Michael and Gabriel.

God, it seems, is a demiurge who has come to hate humanity and now wants to destroy us (a lovely thought). He has commanded the angels to wipe us out. Only one angel (Michael) disobeys him, and wishes to help humanity survive, against the onslaught of all the other angels.

When I realized this in the movie theater, it took me back to thinking about Milton's Paradise Lost. In elaborated Christian mythology, the angel who disobeys God is of course Satan. Thus the movie puts Michael in the role of Satan. But Satan here is portrayed as good, and as the protector of mankind because of his rebellion.

I'd like to make something Blakean out of this, but I don't think the writers and director were aware of anything I said in the last paragraph---or only dimly aware of it.

There are some good performances here, as they are in almost any Hollywood movie. Acting is not where the industry is lacking lately. But the acting is wasted in stupidity.

The characters are stuck in what could be called "Baghdad Cafe in Zombieland." To take a bunch of actors out into the desert and shoot the entire movie in one locale screams of low budget constraints. I can forgive that.

What I can't forgive is that the movie was a complete let down in terms of the moral order of character. We are supposed to be able to figure out which characters will survive and which will die based on their actions, in a moral cause-and-effect relation. Here we get the most nihilistic version of that. Characters die based on no rhyme or reason. They just die, except for the obvious ones that must survive.

The narrative devolves into an utter ripoff of Terminator (baby boy must survive to lead humanity in rebellion). I couldn't wait for this movie to be over.

There were some downright bizarre and offensive stances about guns in this movie. On the one hand, it is portrayed as good and normal that the white cafe owner has guns to defend himself. I'm cool with that, being a 2nd amendment supporter myself.

On the other hand, when the young black man from the city shows he has a pistol, several characters independently give him crap about it, asking why he would need such a thing. Uh, maybe to defend himself against thugs? If anyone should be carrying a weapon to defend himself, it is him. And did I mention that he might need to kill zombies and death angels too? I hate this kind of bullshit progressive double-standard moralizing. To top it off, the character dies heroically, but we don't even see him dead. I kept expecting him to come back.

Legion is so sad and dumb that I barely muster up much energy to criticize it. But I have to. Movies like this just shouldn't be made.

And for the the record, God is love. Just my opinion.