Revelation
(2001)
review by Suspiriorium

Revelation is one of a whole slew of movies dealing with/cashing in on the pre-Millennial angst, this time using an apocalyptic plot that comes on like a mix of Indiana Jones & The Omen. A big problem is that the film didn’t actually show until after the Millennium, & it all now seems a touch old hat. The narrative concerns the efforts of Jake (James D’Arcy) & Mira (Natasha Wightman) to retrieve a mysterious historical artefact known as The Loculus, & their race to understand it’s significance before the forces of Darkness, led by The Grand Master (Udo Kier), can reach them.

There has clearly been a whole lot of attention & detail put into making the religious and archaeological aspects of Revelation as authentic as possible. The trouble is that writer-director Stuart Urban has concentrated on this side of things so much that he seems to have forgotten about several other important elements of his film.

Take the characters for example. Or you could if there were any. All the people in this film seem to exist solely to explain the plot to each other; practically none of them have any colour or spark, & we never get the impression of them being any more than mere nametags. Since we never really care about the characters (and the lead twosome of D’Arcy & Wightman are particularly limp & lifeless), it’s kind of hard to care about anything that happens to them, & the film fails to really engage.

Two actors, however, do manage to make an impression – and I’m not talking about the comatose Terrence Stamp. One is Derek Jacobi, who “stars” in this film in a similar way to George Clooney “starring” in The Thin Red Line. Still, he does seem to have fun with his one scene as The Librarian & I could really feel the film lift when he was onscreen. In fact, such a small role is really a waste of the man’s talents. The other actor who makes an impression is Udo Kier, seemingly wondering in from another, considerably more entertaining film. He keeps popping up every now & then, wearing a daft evil sneer & accompanied by an army of weird demon-things who appear out of nowhere. It’s tempting to imagine that he misjudged what the film was going to be like, but Urban was too scared of him dare ask him to alter his performance. Whatever the reason, the film he has come from is much more fun & entertaining than this one.

And then there’s the narrative. It’s not too bad a narrative, all things considered, but it is also rather over-familiar, & takes in a bewildering array of ideas, from The Crusades, Genetic Engineering, Alchemy, Freemasons, and Ron Moody as Sir Isaac Newton (no, really). Although it does just about manage to squeeze all these elements in, the film feels rather over-stuffed and over-complicated.

Another thing I wasn’t entirely convinced about was the religious aspect. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with having religious aspects to horror films, & it works extremely well for films like The Exorcist & The Omen. But those films take it slowly, & work on convincing you that there might actually be something to it – or that it’s all in the mind. But there’s no such ambiguity in Revelation, & all the characters swiftly buy completely into the whole religious aspects of it. The result is that if you believe, the film might well capture you. But the film makes no effort to convince those more sceptical viewers (likely to be the majority of the audience, I would suspect), & I think it will leave these viewers cold. It might have worked had it been played for fun but this is a deadly serious film, & that makes it slightly harder to enjoy.

If there were another big problem (as well as a lack of humour), I would point to a sorry lack of tension & suspense. There’s one almost OK set piece early on & a couple of passably gory deaths, but there’s no sense of impending threat, no fear, no excitement, nothing really to keep you glued to the seat. It often falls very flat, feeling like a low-budget TV-movie rather than a proper feature, & could probably have used some tighter editing.

Still, it’s not all bad. For all its’ weaknesses, this is a (perhaps over-) ambitious attempt to make a serious, intelligent, thought-provoking, literate & decidedly adult horror film. And I can’t help but give a cheer to that aim, & wish that more films could have such aspirations. It’s just a real shame that the execution this time is not what is could be.

I caught up with Revelation on the UK DVD, which comes in the standard R2/PAL format. The picture is a reasonable 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen, although I was slightly disappointed by the amount of print damage for such a recent film. Other than that, it’s pretty decent, though. Audio is provided courtesy of a pretty good (but nothing to write home about) Dolby 5.1 track.

It does, however, have a pretty big selection of extras. Mostly they are as dry as the film, but very informative & help you appreciate just how much effort was put into getting the religious aspects as spot-on as possible. You get for your money a Commentary track with Stuart Urban, a standard issue Making-of docu, plus documentaries about Alchemy & the Templar Knights. Not a bad haul at all