movies: gabriel

Ma and I went out for Round 2 of shopping today down at Marion, mostly so we could go down to this arts and crafts thing nearby that turned out to be a bit of a waste of time.

And because the Marion Megaplex is turning 10 this weekend, all their movie tickets were $8, so after we'd wandered around Marion for a few hours and picked up almost nothing (well, that's not completely true, I got J's sister's birthday present, and we found a mini collapsible tripod for me, and a couple of other odds and ends for various people) we decided to go and see something at the movies... it was a toss up between two movies, and we actually hadn't made a decision before I went up to the box office to buy the tickets, but as I was standing there the first movie title out of my mouth was Gabriel (we'll go and see the other one on Tuesday).

Gabriel is one of those movies that I hadn't heard anything about until quite recently... then I saw the poster somewhere and read a brief blurb about it being about butt-kicking angels, and the trailer (which has been airing during episodes of Heroes for the last couple of weeks) looked pretty cool... all dark and broody and fighty and whatnot.

I did read in yesterday's paper that the writer/director, Shane Abbess, ran out of money part way through the post production of the movie and actually had to go and work in a call centre (I think) during the day while editing the film at night.

My first comment to Ma after the film was over... "He should have worked a little more overtime."

Now before I start slagging parts of the movie off I will say this... the premise is fantastic (although I will admit that until I reread the blurb I'd forgotten it all takes place in purgatory, which, for the purposes of the movie, takes the form of one large city... but that fact actually makes some things make a little more sense)... and what he did with the money that I assume he was having to work with was fairly impressive... a little raw around the edges, but still impressive... plus the lead actor, Andy Whitfield is freakin hot (especially with the ultra blue "angel eyes"). I could even have lived with somewhat sloppy camera focus in a number of scenes (if that had been the only problem)...

My number one total and complete pet peeve about this movie is the quality of the image. After the opening scene with Gabriel which is pretty sharp and crisp it cuts to a scene with a number of the major villains which looked like it had been filmed, not only through a thick layer of muslin, but on a digital file that had then been copied and copied and copied and saved at a lower resolution each time... the quality was APPALLING! Not to mention the addition of some sloppy focus too.

When you have massive rectangular digital artifices appearing in your images, it's time too look at your quality control processes. And it kept happening... although, interestingly enough it only seemed to be in whatever scenes Gabriel wasn't a part of... scenes of Gabriel alone, usually crystal clear... scenes of Gabriel and another character, a little sloppy, but you could have chalked it up to a visual style had it been throughout the whole movie... scenes without Gabriel in at all, HORRIBLE! There's one scene when three of the "Fallen" (ie the bad guys) are talking in a bar and there's some source of red neon that is flashing across one side of each of their faces as they talk... it honestly looked as though their faces were warping or melting or something. Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad.

At one point I was looking at the screen wondering if Abbess had actually had the movie projected onto a large size screen before he signed it off as done, it was almost like he'd spent the whole time working on it on a 15" monitor and then suddenly it's sprayed I don't know how many metres tall and the image looks like crap.

Except of course when your lead actor is on screen.

Maybe they shot all of the stuff with Whitfield on his own in the first week when they still had money for things like a focus puller and visual effects, I don't know. Supposedly the movie was one of the first features to be filmed using the JVC HD101 camera, but I don't know that if I was from JVC I'd really want them to advertise that fact too widely.

And given that the majority of the cast seemed to be unknowns or people who haven't done a lot of recognisable work (with the exception of Home and Away cast member Amy Mathews in a very, very small role which kinda threw me for a second since she was the first "recognisable" face) I can forgive that a large number of the supposed "neutral or mid-pacific" accents kept slipping... lord knows I have enough trouble keeping to one accent when I'm messing around with silly voices. Plus the whole "inexperienced cast" thing somewhat excuses the occasional lapse in acting ability by some of the peripheral characters... as well as the complete lack of charisma from the lead villain, Dwaine Stevenson aka Sammael (every time somebody said his name I automatically thought of Hellboy though... since the "demon dog things" in that movie are also called Sammael) with his freaky white contact lenses (which were crooked on more than one occasion) and passing resemblance to the lead singer of Aerosmith is something else altogether. I'm just glad that he didn't end up as Gabriel as they'd planned in an early version of the script.

I can also understand, given their seemingly tight budget, that you would do whatever you could to save money and I think that costume designer, Lisa Walpole, raided the wardrobe department where the crew from The Matrix movies left their stuff after they were done, because I swear that one of the characters is wearing Morpheus's sweater (that he wears in the real world)... if it's not Morpheus then it was Neo's... I totally recognised the couple of artful little tears in the shoulder and one lower down...

In some ways that's part of the problem with this movie... it's trying to be The Matrix and The Crow and Underworld and probably some other things that I can't think of right now... but without the finances or visual eye (or the acting in some cases) to back it up.

And I will freely admit the final scene in the movie pretty much makes NO sense... but only when you stop and try and explain what it was all about to the person you're with... then you suddenly realise that you actually have no idea what it was supposed to be about.

All in all it's not a terrible movie (image quality issues notwithstanding)... it's not the most original or unique idea ever made into a feature film, but you do get carried along fairly well, and it's not overly predictable (in spots, yes... as a whole, no). But I honestly can't bring myself to recommend it as a cinema movie because of the quality issues. It might be better on the smaller screen, especially if they can go back in and improve the quality, but I can't be sure.

Which is a shame, because it really is a pretty cool concept.

yani's rating: 1 Arc out of 5