Fallen (2016)

For a film that spent two years in pre-production and lost Walt Disney Pictures along the way, Fallen arrives with the weary dignity of a project finished long after anyone stopped caring. Scott Hicks directs an adaptation of Lauren Kate's young adult novel about a reform academy, a girl blamed for a boy's death, and two mysterious young men revealed as fallen angels locked in an ancient quarrel over her soul. The production decamped to Budapest for castles and angel flight sequences. The result earned a seven percent approval rating. There is a certain honesty in that number.

What the film does not contain is any of the contemporary social apparatus we have spent the past decade cataloguing. The cast is largely white and assembled without evident ideological intent. No character wrestles with identity as a subject. The love triangle is exactly that, a love triangle, and the heroine's repeated death by kissing is treated as romantic tragedy, not as fuel for a critique of anything. When the school psychiatrist offers antipsychotics, the pills serve as a plot device for supernatural gaslighting. The shadows are real. The diagnosis is not. Nobody pauses to educate the audience about institutional power, which in 2016 was still permitted.

This is a film of pure market ambition, and it failed at that too. It wants only to sell tickets to teenagers and launch a franchise that never materialized. There is no sermon, no cause, no corrective to history. The angels fight over a girl because the book said so, and the movie obeys. We can report, with some relief, that Fallen is culturally inert. It is a relic of an earlier mode of adaptation, and its failure is complete enough to leave no residue worth analyzing. The classification is straightforward. Nothing here requires our alarm, or our attention, or another viewing.

That is the whole of it. A handsome cast, a Hungarian castle, a graphic novel within the film that explains the plot more efficiently than the plot does, and a conclusion that promises a sequel nobody commissioned. Some films are dangerous. This one is merely damp. We file it accordingly, without protest, and move on to the next screening.

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