I went to see Priest this week. Mostly out of curiosity because the genre looked a little hard to pin down, and vampires. And the film itself was okay, if not nearly as suspenseful or strong on character as it thought it was. Here's a suggestion - if you are making a sci-fi movie: don't try to pretend that Karl Urban died in the first scene and that we will never see him again. While Paul Bettany might be better known in the mainstream, within the sci-fi/action genre, Karl Urban (and maybe even Maggie Q, also: seriously, try to imagine Bettany fighting Bruce Willis, and finish this post when you're done laughing)is his peer. In a movie like this, he's not going out that fast, and we all know it, so suddenly throwing his face out of the shadows didn't surprise anyone. So the futuristic setting is both a gritty urban dystopia and a neo-western post-apocalyptic wasteland. Paul Bettany is a specialized vampire fighter, of an organization that has been disbanded by order of the despotic government, now that the vampire menace has been ended. However, a vampire attack on a remote frontier outpost with personal consequences for Bettany's character, forces him to defy his skeptical superiors (Christopher Plummer phoning it in, and Alan Dale playing a powerful guy who's sympathetic to the hero for once) in order to thwart the crisis. Also appearing is teen-movie/CW mainstay Cam Gigandet (I don't know if that's how you spell it and could not care less) who seems positively thrilled to a have gun and no more than a single scene opposite a teenage female character, and tries so hard to create dramatic tension between his and Bettany's character, as he plays a frontier sheriff whose love interest has been taken by the vampires and he's afraid the implacable vampire hunter will feel obliged to kill her. And then of course, Bettany's old flame and fellow vampire hunter is sent to track him down for going rogue. Any guesses about how those conflicts come to be resolved? Will the young sheriff win his grizzled new partner's respect and save his girl? Will the vampire hunter stop the vampire leader's plot and get over the shock of his surprising identity? Watch and see. But there's some good action and explosions and slow motion weapons sequences, which is really the whole point of this movie.

That being said, there are two oddities about terminology in this movie. The first one is making the villains vampires. There appears to be no real point to that aside from a scene where a character carves crosses into bullets to use on them. There really are no vampire issues about them, and without changing more than some dialogue, you could have made them carnivorous aliens, mutants or demons, or just about anything, especially given the completely made-up setting. Usually vampires work better in a more familiar setting, as a contrast to normal life. As eyeless monsters who live in a giant hive in the desert and attack on all fours and sleep in cocoons...not so much.

That brings us to the next unnecessary bit of nomenclature: the religious stuff. There is no need for the title of the movie to be "Priest" or the group of vampire-fighters to be called priests, or for the dystopian city to be a theocracy (especially since you would think that in such a system, there would be things for the priests to do once the vampires were eradicated, besides menial labor, as the film suggests in the introduction) or any of the religious imagery. Even the explanation that the two unnecessary names for villains and protagonists justify one another does not work, since there is no real demonstration that there is any real divine power at work augmenting the priests, anymore than in the case of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In fact, the whole thing would probably work better if it WAS set in the present day, with more conventional vampires and the religious issues that might have meaning and controversy given the known position of religion in society. As it is, using religion in a completely fictitious world undermines any religious point you want to make, since the religion, perforce, is also fictitious, and thus irrelevant to a discussion of religion in society and the real world.

In my synopsis of the movie given above, I was able to refrain from any references to religious institutions or characters or roles, which I feel supports my contention that there was absolutely no need to put them in the film in the first place. The only reason I can possibly see is because they are universally held to be wrong. The only vaguely positive depiction of a religiously-named aspect is the heroic priests, who, of course, are at odds with the Church which is also the government. Their bosses who refuse to accept the return of the vampires are cardinals and monsignors and whatnot, and the population appears to be kept in line by mandatory confession sessions where people confess to what appears to be a recording with somewhat less interactive ability than a voice-activated phone directory. And as with every other use of religious terminology, it is completely unnecessary. Literally millions of works have portrayed characters expressing private misgivings while demonstrating that their society or superiors do not share those concerns, without using a confessional.

The only possible reason for the christian stuff is to crap all over it, which brings me to the point of how is this possible? There would be nation-wide outrage, if not violence and litigation/legislation inspired by the film if any mainstream wide-release movie was made as anti-semitic or anti-muslim as this was gratuitously anti-christian. Fighting back is a hate crime against Muslims in movies. Kingdom of Heaven gets crap for being too supportive of the crusades, despite the complete lack of any positively portrayed clergy, and the religious knighthood orders are the villains, with single good member, who nonetheless, goes along with their ill-fated shenanigans. The main character implicitly criticizes the whole concept of a crusade with his anachronistic position on religious tolerance, and Saladin comes across as a benevolent & tolerant ruler who respects Christianity and is generously allows the Christians to depart unmolested (which he did not, in history, both charging large ransoms to allow them to leave, and they were molested anyway) despite being the victim of unprovoked aggression. It film's only criticism of any Muslims comes in the form of blanket condemnations of religious extremism (on both sides, of course). But because the hero is a Christian warrior in the Middle East, there was automatic controversy over the film. And let's not even bother with the antisemitism issue: The most absurd strings of logic were used to condemn "the Passion of the Christ" on that count and its director was made synonymous with antisemitism in the public eye, and blamed for material in the film, which was not of his invention, having been used in an antisemitic fashion by people in completely different countries centuries ago, in manner completely at odds with the official interpretation and meaning of that material, according to the religion to which said director publicly subscribes. That was the sole instance of antisemitism in Gibson's career - the role for which he was most famous featured a Jewish sidekick in three films and ended with Gibson's character being married by a Hebrew-speaking rabbi. But because no one had paid attention to Abraham Foxman in a while, the tenuous and elaborate thread linking a minor scene in the film to antisemitic practices was a topic of national discussion in fora usually dedicated to the discussion of politics and current events! Why is Paul Bettany not under the same scrutiny for his anti-Christian bias? This is at least his third film (Legion, where God & the angels are the villains & some Darwin biopic that specifically explores the conflict between Darwin's scientific belief and his alleged Christianity) with explicit criticism, ridicule or demonizing of Christian institutions, practitioners or traditions being far more prominently featured than any antisemitic aspects of the Passion of the Christ, or anti-muslim aspects in anything, anywhere. Bettany is demonstrably far more anit-Christian than Gibson, but there is no call for him to redeem himself or any concern about his career (not that this stops people from making the claim about each and every pro-Darwin movie being "courageous" or a "daring" risk of the careers of the creators and cast).
The only conclusion that can be drawn from the gratuitous use of Christian imagery in a pure action movie, is the whim of the creative personnel to vent their spleen on the subject of their anti-Christian feelings. There is not even any attempt to constructively criticize Christianity or condemn the commonly alleged abuses or excesses of its practitioners - the stuff is in there SOLELY for the purpose of making an ostensibly Christian Church the bad guy, and to use various terms and practices in a hostile manner. And the unique immunity of anti-Catholicism in particular and anti-Christianity in general to the same sort of criticism and venom aimed at any other form of group hostility.