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William Blake, The Good and Evil Angels

Paul Bettany is exactly the actor I would cast as an angel: he has the pale, elongated, stern look of a William Blake painting. In Legion his archangel Michael is a bit too familiar with modern weaponry, and Gabriel (who resembles Arnold Schwarzenegger) has very sharp wings. God has grown tired of the humans again (which happens every eon or so) and decided to exterminate them. Gabriel of Annunciation fame obediently carries out the order; Michael of kicking Lucifer’s ass (see the Ginebra San Miguel bottle) fame refuses. He’s grown fond of people, those week, deeply flawed creatures who rise above themselves in terrible circumstances (and behave terribly when the going is good). Hey, an angel with free will.

Their battlefield is a diner, appropriately named Paradise Falls, in the dusty middle of nowhere. When the apocalypse happens—we don’t see it, but apparently it involves locusts and the end of TV, radio, phones and the internet (which would lead to mass suicide)—there is a picturesque group of humans marooned at the diner. All of them have issues to work out, and they will get worked out as they fend off a variety of possessed people, including a killer granny. With them is a very pregnant waitress whose child is supposed to be human race’s only hope—we only have Paul Bettany’s word for it, but we believe the accent. It turns out that when it comes to violence, angels are just as vicious as demons.

There’s an entire genre of movies and graphic novels about renegade angels, notably Prophecy, in which Viggo Mortensen’s Lucifer ate someone’s heart. I much prefer badass angels to the sweet smiling cherubs. Apart from the fact that they can’t buy outfits off the rack because wings require custom tailoring, there’s not a lot of official information about angels. They occasionally turn up in scripture to deliver messages (although Raphael is a major character in one of the Deuterocanonicals, The Book of Tobit) and in Revelations to freak people out. We’re each supposed to have a guardian angel; if this is so, I’d like the one with the semi-automatic weapons, please.

Directed by Scott Stewart, Legion also stars Lucas Black whom I remember as that kid who stole All The Pretty Horses from Matt Damon, Dennis Quaid without that grin, Kate Walsh, Tyrese Gibson, and Charles S. Dutton. It’s an entertaining action flick; smart of the filmmakers to frame it not as Good vs. Evil but as Strength vs. Weakness. I got to thinking about the quality of mercy. Compassion is usually portrayed as a weakness, but mercy is a kind of compassion that can only be dispensed by the strong. You can only be merciful towards those you can squash.

My rating: Tuna.