Dominion English Movie Review 2009
Dominion: Prequel to the
Exorcist:hollywood:Movi
Genre: Horror Thriller
Directors:Paul Schrader
Writers:Ben Ripley William Peter Blatty William Wisher Jr.
Release Date:4 December 2009
Cast: Stellan Skarsgård Gabriel Mann Clara Bellar Billy Crawford Ralph Brown
DOMINION: PREQUEL TO THE EXORCIST is arguably more interesting as a piece of film history than as a film in itself. After all, it's not every day (or any day, really) that we get to see what is essentially the basis for an onscreen rewrite.
People who have been tracking such things know that after DOMINION was made, the production company Morgan Creek and distributor Warner Bros. agreed that their movie, directed by Paul Schrader from a script by William Wisher and Caleb Carr, needed more tweaks than could be achieved in the editing room. At this point in a movie's existence, one of three things generally happens it is released during a fallow period; it goes straight to home video; it is shelved entirely. However, in this instance, the producers steadfastly felt they were onto something and hired Alexi Hawley to rewrite the Wisher/Carr screenplay retaining enormous amounts of material and brought in Renny Harlin to direct the immediate remake, entitled EXORCIST: THE BEGINNING. They even kept the same star, Stellan Skarsgard as Father Merrin, the priest who the audience knows will one day go on to exorcise the possessed little girl in the original EXORCIST. Now, about a year later, they've decided to release DOMINION theatrically after all. The real surprises aren't in the differences, but in the similarities.
In other words, if you've seen EXORCIST: THE BEGINNING, there's a lot in DOMINION you'll instantly recognize. Merrin's viscerally bracing opening trek through a Hellscape is gone, but a sequence during the Nazi occupation of a village, where Merrin is forced to make an unspeakable choice, is almost identical. In the new version, there's no sleazy antiquities dealer propelling Merrin to Africa, but he still winds up supervising the excavation of a fifth-century church from an era when Christianity had not yet reached this part of the world, mysteriously buried on the lands of the Turkana tribe. Other elements present in both films are the notion of supernatural evil as the source of suspicion, ethnic hatred and murder, with the tribesmen and British soldiers becoming increasingly hostile toward one another and, of course, an innocent who becomes possessed.
DOMINION turns out to be both less silly and less entertaining than BEGINNING. Skarsgard, who gives good performances in both, is allowed to be less grim and more nuanced here he's depressed but not quite as wretched in this one. It's easy to see where the producers felt certain things needed clearing up for instance, making it a lot clearer what the church is doing out there in the first place and finding more visual and aural links to what audiences might reasonably expect of something with EXORCIST in the title. BEGINNING also commits itself to traditional "jump" scares, an effect that doesn't particularly seem to have caught Schrader's interest.
Then again, there are certain elements that were made undeniably worse in BEGINNING. Case in point: the special effects hyenas, which in DOMINION look like animatronic stuffed animals; in BEGINNING, they look like videogame sock puppets. At least BEGINNING gets rid of the likewise unlikely-looking carnivorous cattle.
DOMINION has a few things going on in it that are understandable but unsuccessful experiments. In choosing a severely physically distorted "boy" (a designation that seems somewhat iffy to begin with, as actor Billy Crawford is adult-sized) as the innocent suffering demonic possession, the filmmakers give themselves the problem of a character who starts out as enigmatic and impenetrable we don't know much about him except that he's crippled, mildly deformed and has a tragic existence. There's little room to relate to him as a character, or to anybody else's attachment to him, before he becomes Satanically afflicted. Further, the confrontation between Merrin and the demon seems oddly non-climactic not just because we know they're destined for another face-off in a few decades, but because it feels like on the one hand, the filmmakers want to put forth a genuine theological debate but on the other hand haven't come up with an argument that they feel in their bones is killer. The result is a theological wrangle that is intellectually intriguing without being compelling.
DOMINION: THE PREQUEL TO THE EXORCIST winds up being a lot quieter, a little less loony and a little less schlock-horror fun than EXORCIST: THE BEGINNING. However, it may be compelling for film fans to see how two directors and a change of screenwriters can take the same plot points and do something quite different with them.
