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Hywel Bennett, Siv Borg, Sylvia Coleridge

Paranormal novelist Gideon Harlax is drawn into a battle between the forces of good, represented by alien angel Helith, and the forces of evil, represented by Helith's evil brother Asrael. Ranging fro...( read more  read more... )m Oxford to Denmark, a North Sea ferry to an alien planet, Harlax unwittingly becomes part of an ancient plot that may result in the destruction of Earth...

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33% liked it

14 ratings

Unrated, 185 min

Directed by: Alastair Reid

Release Date: December 29, 1981

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Flixster Reviews (3)

  • jfvirey
    June 24, 2009
    jfvirey
    I am slightly disgusted to report that this recently unearthed "cult BBC Science Fiction film" (or so says the DVD jacket) was the most promising title I had spotted after browsing through the 800 or so reviews on the totalscifionline website. I was looking for something differen...( read more)t, with more brains and no CGI or action scenes, something "one of a kind", and my attention was drawn by the description of the hero as "cold" and "analytical" (he is actually a frigid, bisexual David Hemmings look-alike) and of the plot as "wilfully complex."

    Unfortunately, the film turned out to be the kind of "science fiction" that gets written by people who think that the genre is nothing more than juvenile trash and that they can reinvent it for mature audiences, uprooting it from its pop culture soil and transplanting it into a more elevated sphere, with such references as Alfred Hitchcock, Pagan mythology and the great Danish composer Carl Nielsen.

    On his website, the author admits he "can see why some disparage it now as a 'pretensh-fest'" but defends "its prodigality with images, and its mythic charge that flows into parts of us that meaner contemporary tv drama (and cinema for that matter) do not even know are there." Out of charity, and of fear that I might have missed something deep by dozing off at crucial moments, I tried to listen to his DVD commentary, but he hadn't seen the movie for about 25 years and seemed almost to know less about it than the other two commentators.

    The imagery is a mixture of the gothic and the (then) modernistic, the dialogues are disjointed efforts at existentialist "depth", and all the characters have an unshakable seriousness about them, as if the film was some sort of wake for a matriarch with terminal cancer. It starts as a kind of ponderous British version of the X-Files, and becomes more and more pretentious and incomprehensible as its three hours go by and the mythical charge fails to detonate.

    Despite the very unserious titles I have recently reviewed, I wouldn't hesitate to call this the silliest thing I have seen in months.

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