Sunday 5 June 2011

Priest

I already said last year that I love vampire films. Those creatures that have managed to overcome that miserable process we call aging, but at the price of feeding on others that had been their equals, living young surrounded by death, finding refuge in darkness, in solitude... well, these are pretty fascinating living beings.
I also love dystopic films, maybe it's because being rather pessimistic about the future of mankind (megacorporations, overpopulation, anthropic climate change, natural climate change, ignorant massess willing to accept any stupid placebo or idea thrown at them...) dystopic films seem like pretty realistic predictions to me.

From the two paragraphs above it's easy to conclude that once I knew about the release of a Dystopic vampires film: Priest, I got rather anxious to grab my hands on it.

Priest is an excelent film: vampires, a ravaged world trying to get over by means of a fundamentalist Religious state (that's an interesting deflection from the classical Stalinist states portrayed in most dystopic stories), tortured former heroes treasured by their leaders (the Priests seem a bit like Vietnam veterans or Chernobyl liquidators, sacrifice, pain...

The film draws inspiration from many different good sources (in the end the ingredients are far from new, what is rather fresh is its combination): Equilibrium (the clergies, the outfits), The Book of Eli (the desert landscapes, the Far-West feeling), Resident Evil 3 (the desert again) and the theatrical poster is terribly reminiscent of this beautiful Underworld poster:



The choice of the Church to incarnate oppression, ruthless leadership and social incarnation seems excellent to me. In the cold war era, Soviet style governments where a logical (maybe not so correct) choice for this matter, but at the present time the idea of oppresion is much more connected to religion (Radical Islam, Orthodox Jews, Fundamentalist Christians...), and our fears are born from our experiences...

All in all, another must-see film (but I have a huge complain, it's terribly short, less than 90 minutes for a story that could have kept us entertained for at leas 120 minutes).

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