Risen 

 Cast: Joseph Fiennes, Tom Felton, Peter Firth, Maria Botto, Cliff Curtis, Stewart Scudamore 

                           Director: Kevin Reynolds

107 mins

“Risen,” tackles the subject, rarely dealt with in cinema, of the resurrection and the alleged 40 days thereafter, prior to Christ’s supposed ascension. Director Kevin Reynolds offers a reconstruction of these events through the religious conversion of a Roman soldier who was heavily involved in the crucifixion. Afterwards, on the orders of Pontius Pilate, he has to, somewhat reluctantly, sift through countless rotting corpses to find the body of Christ, operating under the assumption that it was stolen from the tomb, further to what Pilate felt was the fiction of a resurrection. Surprisingly the result isn’t as dreadful as most biblical outings end up being, apart from a couple of sequences inadvertently wobbling dangerously close to “The Life of Brian” territory.

Following a gory battle of stones and spears, Clavius (Joseph Fiennes) returns to Jerusalem, where through some overly hammy poncing about from Peter Firth as Pilate, he is informed that, upon the insistence of the Jewish high priests, he must head off without a shower (yes, apparently they had them way back then) to Golgotha, and see to it that the would-be messiah on the cross, has in fact, died. Ashe apparently puts Yeshua (Jesus) out of his misery, Clavius then prepares to throw the body into a mass grave, but Joseph of Arimathea arrives with permission from Pilate to take it to his family tomb. The local procurator orders Clavius to formally seal the entrance and have guards put on patrol outside to ensure that the body won’t be surreptitiously removed. The guards must have been flown in specially from Moss-side Liverpool, so thick are their preposterous scouse accents. These precautions fail to prevent the body’s sudden and inexplicable disappearance, so Clavius is assigned to recover it.

There is another ludicrous, and possibly not intentional, scene where Clavius asks a group of his soldiers whether any of them know a “woman of the streets” named Mary Magdalene (Maria Botto) – upon which most of them sheepishly raise their hands. More curious however, is the interrogation of the disciple Bartholomew, (Stephen Hagan), who resembles a laid back surfer-dude hippy who has accidentally trotted on to the set from a theatre production of “Jesus Christ Superstar.” Eventually Clavius tracks down all the disciples having a drink in a relaxed session with the risen Yeshua (Cliff Curtis) and off he heads in a pre-ascension procession, with a couple of cheesily set-up miracles involving a leprosy victim and a netful of fish – both of which finally persuade him of the executed man’s divinity. Despite all the mishaps and miscalculations, and whilst it’s scarcely a masterpiece, the oblique approach here to the Gospel story makes “Risen” a more engaging re-telling than most of the tedious cardboard holier-than-thou similarly-themed films released in the past.

 

MIDNIGHT SPECIAL 

Cast: Michael Shannon, Joel Edgerton, Kirsten Dunst, Jaeden Lieberher

Director: Jeff Nichols

111 mins

Writer-director Jeff Nichols’ strange 2011 film Take Shelter went beyond the mysteries of the human heart, and into a more cosmic kind of conundrum. His protagonist then (and as now in Midnight Special) played by Michael Shannon, seems to be a man in receipt of prophetic warnings about a potential calamity. Nichols open-ends proceedings in both films, leaving his audience in the main, wondering whether the leading man is mentally ill, or really tuned into something extra-terrestrial. Nichols is clearly a huge fan of ambiguity, or perhaps he simply runs out of ideas and this is his method.

So to focus now on Midnight Special, which leaves even more portals of possibility wide open over the course of its 111-minutes. The film is composed almost entirely of mysteries – the main one being just what the hell is this all about, as virtually nothing is even remotely resident in the land of resolution by the final scenes. This is like part two of a trilogy from someone who may have parts one and three somewhere in his head, but who couldn’t be bothered sharing them with the cinema-going public. It certainly doesn’t get bogged down in exposition and explanation, thus leaving the whole piece an extremely unsatisfactory experience in so many respects. The film opens mid-action, with Roy (Michael Shannon) and his friend Lucas (Joel Edgerton) hustling Roy's young son Alton (Jaeden Lieberher) across the country under cover of night. The police, for reasons unknown, consider Roy a kidnapper and a fugitive, and he and Lucas are armed and on the edge. But Alton seems curiously calm about the whole endeavour. He's a small, solemn child who can't bear sunlight and hides from the world under tinted swimming goggles and external-noise-limiting headphones. Clearly he’s an odd but ‘special’ youngster, with an aura of maturity and otherworldliness, yet another in an endless array of uncanny cinematic children. His aloofness only briefly drops into something resembling normality when the trio finally pitch up at his mother’s home, ie Sarah (Kirsten Dunst). Soon, she too is off on her travels with the fleeing chaps in an effort to get to a specific set of geographical co-ordinates by a specific date, for reasons unknown and never fully explained.

Most of the mystery of Midnight Special comes from the fact that following the briefest of title sequences, you’ll feel you’ve missed the first hour. Alton, apparently is a messiah figure for a creepy bunch of church-going nutjobs who take the numbers he recites during his periodic seizures whilst speaking in tongues, as some wacky form of holy scripture. Their leader, Calvin Meyer (Sam Shepard), apparently, adopted Alton a few years ago, and believes he will soon usher the members of "The Ranch" into some undefined next phase of salvation or some such gibberish. How and why did Roy adopt Alton in the first place? How and when did the Ranch form? Why did Sarah abandon Alton, why are Roy and Sarah still clearly fond of each other but live miles apart and what did Roy have to do to get the boy back? These aren't simply minor curiosities, they scream out at you – waiting for explanations that never come. The Ranch alone is a potentially fascinating cult segment that is just left unexplained, undeveloped and unattended, ridiculously so. Midnight Special has the boy Alton as a pseudo messiah figure in the centre of a potential political storm but religious themes aside, the emotions here are shallow because there’s so little sense of where they’re coming from. There are plenty of tense thrills and surprise revelations, it is relentless, but rarely rushed. The action is terse, and in one unexpected case, breathless and terrifying, but it leaves a haunting shadow of the bigger, better film it could have been.