October 26, 2007
The Reaping (2007)
The Reaping
The death of a child in mysterious circumstances; sparks of a series of events that seem to represent biblical plagues, start occurring in of all places a town called *Haven* located deep in the bowels of bible belt country in the bayous of Louisiana. A former Christian missionary turned religious phenomena debunker and her top open minded student turned personnel assistant is sent to investigate.I really had high hopes for this movie. I thought Katherine (Hillary Swank) would stick to her guns and debunk this too, but as soon as the satanic cult was mentioned, in the last 40 minutes of the movie, I knew all hope was lost for being able to stick to science to explain what was happening in the town.
Katherine is a former missionary and ordained minister, whose husband and daughter were sacrificed by the native people they had been preaching to, because as soon as the missionaries arrived, it didn't rain again. For a whole year.
The native people killed her family and had tried to kill her, in order to please the gods.
Since then, Katherine has lost her faith and now goes around debunking "miracles".
She gets a request to come to the small town of Haven because the river has turned to blood, the fish and frogs are dying, and while she's there, there's a plague of boils and locusts, cattle die and become crazy rabid attack cows.
The townspeople have Katherine believe it's the work of a little 12 year old girl just entering puberty, who is the cause of all the bad happenings, that she's in league with satan.
Katherine tries to explain things through science, runs tests, does everything she can until she sees a symbol for a cult.
She then calls a former priest friend, who just so happens to get burned to death while telling Katherine of the prophecies while speaking to her by phone, and she starts to believe the girl is indeed in league with the devil.
But it was the townspeople who had lied, they were the satanic cult who wanted to kill the girl but couldn't, because the girl was actually an angel sent by god to destroy the cult members.
The last plague is the death of the first borns, and most of the towns people end up dead, and Katherine helps save the girls life because she figures out that the girl is sent from God.
This whole experience changes her, restores her faith.
As she and the girl drive away from town, the girl places her hand on Katherine's belly and tell her she's pregnant with a boy.
Katherine had only thought she dreamed of having sex with the satanic cult leader, he needed to create another child apparently, and chose Katherine as the host mother for the devils new spawn.
This movie is bad. Just bad.
It was a terrible disappointment to see Katherine lose science so quickly in the face of things she normally would have proven false with science.
The dream of having sex, the pregnancy, bah, stupid.
I will say the movie had excellent special affects.
The plague of locusts was visually stunning, but this movie sucked ass.
If I had those little stars to do a scale of 1-5, this movie would get a 1 for special effects, and that's it.
It sucked.
