Sunday, December 11, 2016

Fallen - Everlasting Love of An Angel Who Had Fallen to Earth

I saw the posters of this movie for quite some time in the website of Cinema 21 in the "coming soon" part and when I read the synopsis about love between a person an angel, I thought the premise seemed interesting. However, I did have doubts as there was no familiar names playing in this film. Nevertheless, as I plan to watch another movie that only played at 4.30 PM in another theater, I had some time to kill before I plan to go to that mall. So since this was the only movie that I had not watched, I decided to go and see this one at 1.15 PM at Setiabudi. I would have enough time to leave the place by 3 PM and see the other film in different location. Well what is the story all about?

Brief Story Line

Movie started with the narrative of the story of angels of heaven who had to take sides when Lucifer, the most loved angel by God was fighting with God. There were some angels who did not want to choose either side, but instead they stayed among the humans and choose the side of love. Later scene moved to Lucinda Price (Addison Timlin - The Town that Dreaded Sundown etc) being driven by her parents to a private school named Swords and Crosses. Just like any other private schools, there were a lot of activities that could be attended by Luce as mentioned by the headmaster. However, apparently the school is not just a normal private schools as it was revealed later that the students there were mostly having some personal troubles or when parents did not have any idea on how to handle their children.

On her first day of arrival, Luce met with a bad boy named Cam (Harrison Gilbertson - Need for Speed etc) who seemed to take an interest on Luce. Luce was also introduced to another girl named Arianne (Daisy Head - Underworld: Blood Wars) who did not realize that Luce was one of the girls who had "mental problem". Arianne always hang out with Roland (Malachi Kirby) and Gabbe (Hermione Corfield - Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, Pride Prejudice and Zombies etc). Luce was also being tormented by a girl with gothic appearance named Molly (Sianoa Smit-McPhee) who seemed to know something about Luce' pass. Meanwhile, when she was collecting books for her study, Luce met the religion teacher named Sophia (Joely Richardson - The Girl with The Dragon Tatto, Nip/Tuck TV series etc).

At school, Luce befriended with Penn (Lola Kirk - Gone Girl) who due to her smartness was having access to the high school's database. She warned Luce to be careful with Cam, Arianne and her friends and especially to the boy that Luce seemed to be attracted to named Daniel (Jeremy Irvine - War Horse, Stonewall etc). For some reasons, Luce was drawn to Daniel and tried her best to find out why she had the feeling she had known him before. However, Daniel always tried to avoid her. The attraction became stronger when Daniel saved Luce from an accident that almost took her life.

Slowly the movie would reveal the reason why Luce was being put in the school, as there seemed to be a fire back in her home town that may have been caused by her. Luce also seemed to be having visions that she could not understand. It was shown that she was supposed to take medication for this which would make her return to her normal life. But Luce disagree to this as she believed it would make her become someone else. The visions that Luce had were actually becoming more intense whenever Luce was in physical contact of Daniel. Things also got complicated due to Cam's insistence in trying to get close to Luce and Luce little attracted of Cam's charm and also the way Molly always tried to bully Luce using her detail knowledge about Luce's pass. 

So what was the reason for the visions Luce was having? Why was there image of Daniel in her visions in the past? What was Cam's real intention of seducing Luce and why Molly always tried to bully Luce?

End of Brief Story Line

Hmmm, what can I say about this movie? At first I thought the movie was going to be just a love story between human an angel and it would be a beautiful story with panoramic scenes and good looking actors and actresses that would make please the audience eyes. However, the story then became a bit mysterious and it was OK as it did make me intrigued and hooked up on the mystery. But the mystery actually made it a bit distracting since the movie felt to be not too focused. Is it supposed to be a pure love story or actually a mysterious religious movie? The ending also was a bit surprising as it involved some eye catching fight scenes. Then again, the ending was the bit that really frustrated me as it was a cliffhanger.

Anyway, after watching it, then I read more detail about the movie and realized that it was actually adapted from a young adult novel titled the same name written by Lauren Kate. Apparently this is only the first of the "Fallen" series and there were some more novels after this one which would explain the cliffhanger ending.

That said, my view of the movie is that it should have been made into a TV series instead of a movie. If the producer think that they have got a new series worthy of spawning sequels like Twilight saga, or even Divergent series, then they got it all wrong. If they had made into a TV series, there are so many potential plots that I could think of and I truly believe that they could be more successful had they done so. Not that I am a clairevoyant, but I could not foresee this movie to be a hit when they did not even have a wide release date in US and the rest of the world. At best it might only go straight to video or limited release for short time. My personal view is that the movie makers did not do justice to the novel as I am sure the novel would have been much better otherwise it would not have been in the best seller list with > 10 million copies sold worldwide.

Nevertheless, if you are interested in seeing a movie with some lovely sceneries, lovely people and quite "lovely" fight then you can certainly try watching this one. However, if you got problem with cliffhanger ending or cheesy teenagers love scenes then I would not recommend you to watch it. If you have some other options to watch movies in theater, then I would suggest you watch other movies and simply wait for this to show in cable TV next year.

Mike's movie moments rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

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