Admirable film.

Absolutely Fantastic

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Okay, it's rated "R" for a reason. It's violent and bloody and cruel, with dreadful deaths and incredible random senseless cruelty.I get that. It's "real life." But there is so *much* of this nonstop cruelty and violence and just stupid people being cruel and awful and violent.What a dreadful waste of talented actors. We expected better of Pierce Brosnan and Liam Neeson, among others. And we expected more of a movie that was filmed in such spectacular natural beauty.Alas, it was not to be. We watched for about 15 minutes and then decided we'd had enough of the general stupid violence. The movie went to the trash.

In 1868, Liam Neeson and his shrinking band of hired help tracks the lone Pierce Brosnan through the mountain wilderness and then down into the valley where each must pass through various Western iconic communities: the trapper's cabin up in the mountains, the wagons of the religious settlers, the mining camp with its likker-drinking Irish, and the lone miracle-cure peddler on her cart.You don't learn until more than half-way through exactly WHY Neeson is pursuing Brosnan. It was at the end of the Civil War. Due to accident and misunderstanding, Captain Brosnan's men burned down the barn and the house of peaceful farmer Liam Neeson. Neeson's lovely wife, their child, and their little baby were in the house. Neeson's thirst for revenge is unslakable.It's COLD up in those mountains. Everyone is bundled up in great big bearskin coats. Brosnan is wounded in the shoulder and there is a painful scene in which he screams while extracting the ball and cauterizing the wound. The script is perceptive enough to have him treat the arm tenderly for the rest of the movie.Brosnan loses his bearskin coat when he falls in a river, goes over what looks like Victoria Falls, and manages to swim away. This guy is clearly on a first name basis with suffering.The framework for this story was provided by some previous exercises in survival in the wilderness against great odds. "First Blood: Rambo" and "The Outlaw Josey Wales" are chief among them, but some shots try to duplicate "Lawrence of Arabia". There's even a notion ripped off from Liam Neeson's own "Rob Roy," in which Brosnan hides inside a hollowed-out dead animal.It's designed as a fairy tale, I think. It's hard to tell whether the writers and director expect us to believe that Brosnan could survive under those conditions, or that Angelica Huston could appear out of nowhere with a horse and wagon in the middle of a parched desert, and then be on her merry way. Or -- how can Brosnan climb thirty feet into a tree and then drop a big knife directly onto the skull of a pursuer, knowing where the pursuer will stand, and that the knife will (hold on) PIERCE THE SKULL as easily as a hypodermic syringe penetrates the skin? In the end, the two men have battled and bloodied each other to exhaustion and both have lost the ability to kill, so they stagger off on this dry plain, each going his separate direction, before both figures dissolve into nothingness.If there is a covert message, and the film seems to creak at the joints trying to impart one, it must go something like: "Let bygones be bygones," or "Peace is better than war," or "Cut the crap." Not much acting is required, though it's always nice to see familiar faces on the screen, even if they wind up looking like homeless urban campers. The way Brosnan's beard comes out, it can't help making him into a comic figure. He could be in a Charlie Chaplin movie. And I like Liam Neeson, but I like him much better as a nice guy than as a grim reaper. His nose begins in the middle of his forehead. I certainly hope it has nothing to do with the fact that Neeson was born in Northern Ireland and Brosnan in the Republic.Neeson even gets to come up with a famous quotation: "Only the dead have seen the end of war." It's usually been attributed to Plato, and that sounds right but it's evidently untrue. It appears to have come from Santayana's "Soliloquoys" written after World War I : "Yet the poor fellows think they are safe! They think that the war is over! Only the dead have seen the end of war." Santayana does not attribute the saying to Plato, or anybody else. I'm just throwing this trifle in. I had to Google it myself.

When I was in eighth grade, several of us got a 8mm camera and made a movie called "The Chase," which was mainly two of our friends in costume chasing one another around San Diego's Balboa Park. Seraphim Falls is a chase film, but it's filmed with beauty and precision in New Mexico, and thought the plot is equally simple, the character development and the allegorical overlay makes it, if perhaps a little long, a compelling old fashioned Western.Neeson and Brosnan, both Irish, play Civil War officers with bad blood between them, the reasons for which slowly unfold as one stalks the other--on the way, they encounter a railway being built, a religious cult plopped down in the desert, a lone native American in a top hat by an oasis--in other words, enough variety to keep the chase fascinating--and the music drives the plot along nicely, the grand sweep of the photography from mountain ranges to cracked desert floors a trip in itself. It's no masterpiece, but a solid, old-fashioned Western with a thematic update.

I consider myself a bit of cinephile...yet this hidden gem escaped my attention for 7 years. I stumbled upon it tonight on a random search for things I hadn't seen. I was not disappointed.This is a tight, short, compact beauty of a movie. An acting tour de force (ironically between two irish actors in a western). This movie took in less box office in it's run than 'Taken 2' took in in it's first hour, but what a movie! The whole thing is very atmospheric, moody...you really feel for the two lead characters. Uniquely we never get vested in who is the hero and who is the villain. They both have redeeming qualities, and they both have their dark side. I never felt I was on either side of the equation, I just watched the story unfold without the obligatory Hollywood right vs. wrong, good vs. evil. It was a simple story between two good men and their past misgivings catching up to them. It's not the greatest movie I have ever seen, I didn't learn anything new, but it was a breath of fresh air in the era of cookie cutter movies. The ending was about as anti-Hollywood as I've ever seen.Watch this, you will not be disappointed.