Still As Life

On Monday evening, I was at uni, for no other reason then that the router at home was completely rooted yet again and was failing to do anything useful at all, and being that it is not my router, and I don't have access to the internet password, I couldn't do much about it.

As one can no doubt imagine, this would be really quite annoying, however, at 8 or so, my good friend Rhiannon sent me a message to see if I wanted to go see a movie as she was quite bored. Sounded like a plan as I was quite over working on a slow connection for that evening.

We decided to go see Gabriel at 9:15, so I had just enough time to get from uni to the cinema at Garden City. I wasn't really sure what to expect from the movie, given that it was meant to be about purgatory, which, as a Seventh Day Adventist, I firmly believe does not exist and is merely a creation of men.

All the same, it looked like it could be interesting so I decided to go along with it. The first 20 minutes or so of it are really a bit boring and introduce you to a series of characters with some bad fake accents. However, it does get much better.

It is a dark action/gothic style of film and the story of the movie revolves around an arc angel, Gabriel, fighting to restore the light to purgatory, as it had become controlled by the fallen.

It really quite surprised me actually, but as the movie progressed, the story line became quite interesting, and while I don't agree with the concept of the movie, I think it was done really well and had some very good idea's, such as portraying purgatory as a city.

The film techniques remind me a great deal of SinCity, and while the acting is not always good, particularly among some of the fallen, much of the acting is very well done, though I think it would have been better if some of the characters had not attempted fake accents.

It was easy to pick up in the first 20 minutes that there were a great deal of Australian actors in the movie, and as it progressed, we both thought it must have been filmed in Australia as well, turns out we were right, it was filmed in Sydney and in the Hunter Valley in NSW.

I've read a few comments on it on the IMDB Gabriel User Comments page, and there are some very poor comments on there that I have to disagree with. There are comments about it being a low budget Aussie film, and for what it is, it is good. Other's just not giving it a chance at all. Personally, I thought it was a good idea, I don't think the fact that it is an Australian film should even matter. Sure, some of the acting is a tad embarrassing, so what? There is plenty of bad acting coming out of the American film industry as well. My opinion of it is that it was well executed, and is definitely one of the better low budget films out there and it left me wanting to see more.

This could in part be that some of the plot occasionally left out information or seemed to skip seemingly important things, but I don't really believe this is the case as the things that seemed to be skipped were mostly explained later on. I think the wanting to see more was caused more by the fact that in it's genre it was well done, the action scenes were not over the top, but they were executed excellently, and while the plot had flaws, it kept one very interested the whole way through.

I definitely want to see it again, but after it is out on DVD.

Labels: movies