Setting the Bar

The Exorcist: The Beginning is the 2004 prequel to The Exorcist. You know that movie: the one where the little girl’s head spins, she vomits green vomit and there is an old priest and a young priest. In this version, Stellan Skarsgard stars as a priest that has left the Church after bearing witness to and participating in atrocities during World War II in Germany. He is now an archaelogist in Cairo and is asked to go to a dig site in Kenya where a Byzantine Church is being unearthed. He is asked to participate in the dig, to recover an ancient artifact but realizes that the Church, which was buried in pristine condition, actually houses some evil that is now infecting the region and which is being unearthed by the dig. The dig unearths another temple dedicated to Satanism and an evil spirit - Pazuzu- who we meet later on in The Exorcist. The end scene fight is the fight that is referenced in the original Exorcist movie.

I hated this movie. Plain and simple. Why, oh, why must they do this when the original was so good? The horrendous nature of the movie is masked by useless gore - nasty skin diseases, slit throats, axes in heads, shots of deformed babies - and it is as if they are PROUD to have masked how atrocious this movie is with the gore. There is no depth to the plot or the characters, even though one of them - Merrin, the priest - has been handed to producers and directors on a plate. We don’t learn anything about the demon Pazuzu at all, which is a disappointment, considering that this is a prequel and prequels are supposed to explain things aren’t they? The Catholic themes that dominated the first one and made it scary and uncomfortable to watch, are non-existent or just plain stupid in this movie. Not even Skarsgaard, who can be quite a good actor in some circumstances, could save this movie and at some points, he probably could have shouted :”This is awful” and it would have worked better than the script that he was forced to repeat.

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