Harlin's Version of Exorcist Merrin Movie

 I could spend an inordinate amount of time just shitting on Harlin's Exorcist: The Beginning (2004), and while I'm the first to say that it is Effects Overload (well, Everything Overload), there are some positive aspects I take from the film. I cut Harlin some slack. Yes, this is a Hollywood Effects Movie. I think Morgan Creek wanted their demonic possession and a struggling-with-his-faith Merrin backstory where he reclaims it through an exorcism. And that is what Harlin did...for better or worse. Morgan Creek threw more money at this Father Merrin story of a time in his past, when he visited Egypt and encountered a demonic evil freed from a buried cathedral supposedly keeping a sacrificial cavern under subjection. They wanted someone possessed and the story Harlin directs is a con where a little boy from a local tribe is thought to be under a demonic hold when in actuality a doctor, Sarah (Izabella Scorupco), is the actual victim, having entered the cursed cathedral with her husband (Patrick O'Kane). While Sarah's husband "went mad", she unfortunately was invaded, later to be made up into a Howdy-Possessing-Regan clone. The white face with cuts all over and colored contact lenses with the usual dirty profane sexual phrases one expects from a Pazuzu like demonic presence. Merrin (the excellent Stellan Skarsgård ) must reclaim his lost faith, ask God for forgiveness for his "sabbatical" (though many might understand why he left the Church after Nazis shoot kids and then tell him to choose the adult Jews to die in order to stop anymore child bloodshed), and face off with the demon as it moves into the bowels of cavernous tunnel under the cathedral. The film includes a tribe deciding to perform a ritualistic killing of the child they believe is possessed after stillbirths shake them, with an archaeologist (a repulsive Alan Ford) later found hanging by his arms in the cathedral chewed up with a large hole in his lower torso; prior to that he was suffering lesions while also harassing Sarah. Eventually the British military is called in by a priest, Father Francis (James D'Arcy), and Major Granville (Julian Wadham) responds to Ford's Jeffries death by shooting the tribes leader, eventually triggering a later onslaught where Granville's soldiers and the tribe (with spears and other natural weapons) begin a battle that seems instigated by whatever evil has fled the now visible cathedral (the tribe were led by Jeffries to clean away the sand covering up the church).

I think the star of this film is Vittorio Storaro, the director of photography. I loved when Father Mirren and Father Francis first set foot in the cathedral and see the angel statues and portraits of Lucifer's fall on the walls inside. And when Father Mirren moves the top of what looks like a crypt, which is actually a seal to the sacrificial cavern tunnel, locating the Pazuzu statue in the dark...the candlelight and lantern light use as Mirren searches into the unknown dark is just captivating. And there is this great scene where Sarah's medical clinic faces a brief power outage, her hair wet and walking about naked under a towel, only a candlelight assisting her as she moves about to investigate...it's the unknown, again, that provides suspense and tension. Although we later realize she had been possessed the entire time Mirren was at the dig site, during this point in the film there was no real indication of it. The film does clue us in when the tribe move in to kill the child suffering from a type of in-and-out coma (the boy collapses after his bullying brother is attacked by a vicious pack of jackals that tear the poor kid apart) that something is in the hospital...but it isn't the boy possessed when tribal members suffer snapping bones that persuade them to flee. All the dust storms, breaking glass in slow motion, trembling bodies, eyes going white, blood all over the place, and eventual demon human scaling dark walls (and the big climax where the tribe and soldiers kill each other) are just Harlin and company trying to deliver what Morgan Creek wanted. There is very little substance beyond  Skarsgård and Scorupco giving strong performances and taking the characters and their struggle very seriously. They really do try to rise above all the theatrics. The theatrics I can't defend but I think the work of Storaro is exemplary. There is some sweeping camerawork that really aims for heights the demon possession material and Hollywood grand CGI (the massive opening has a priest walking among a whole vast area of dead, with many hanging upside down on crosses), and the big dust windstorm in the finale is The Fog 2005 bad. But I still think there is good in this film. This is the very definition of a mixed bag. But so much money had already been sunk into Schrader's "Dominion" that Harlin was basically brought in to try and salvage what was rightfully already a seemingly lost cause. But some of the cast do try to right the ship even though their work was unfortunately in vain. Both films were critical and audience misfires. I guess the best way to say it is when Harlin's film is good, its really good and when its bad, it's very, very bad. 2/5

***There is a horrifying back story for Sarah, too, involving the Nazis and what they do to her that keeps her from having child. When a trail of blood leads to her and she finds it come from her specifically, she reveals to Merrin that it isn't possible that she could have caused it so only something demonic would be responsible.***