devils and angels and hell! Oh my!

[drunkoffthestars]

xoverau? I don't know if you read my journal, but I watched Constantine, and I totally get your thing for Keanu/John Constantine now!

Whenever I see a movie that heavily draws on Christian/Catholic themes/dogma/traditions, I'm always terrified that they are going to mangle it horribly in some way. But I was rather impressed with how they handled the whole "suicide=hell" and then "possibility of redemption" thing. I think my only problem with the whole thing was I don't think that they made it REALLY clear on what redeemed him. I mean, if your going to go with the premise that all suicides go to hell, (and your character commits suicide nearly 3 times over) then I would think that you would be much more clear about what has redeemed your condemned character. But I did like how they set it up as him using his soul as a bargaining chip with Satan for the redemption of Isabelle. I thought that was nicely illustrative of the whole concept of self-sacrifice without expecting a reward. He thought he was going to hell anyway, but he made his death serve some good purpose.

I also thought it was also interesting that they made a distinction between knowing and believing/having faith. I'm not really sure what to do with that one, but I thought it was interesting. Or rather, an interesting twist on the whole "non-belief due to lack of logical proof".

Comments

[xoverau.livejournal.com]

Eeee! Finally I can squee with someone about it! It's ironic, too, because I just got to hug Gavin Rossdale last night and tell him how much I loved his performance as Balthazar, which put me in the mood to watch Constantine again. After that, I bet I'll have more thoughts. :)

[clare-san.livejournal.com]

^_^ I wasn't expecting to like that movie nearly as much as I did. It's funny. It's one of those ones that I feel like I need to watch a couple more times to fully absorb all the different angles.