Plot: A young girl finds herself in a reform school after therapy since she was blamed for the death of a young boy. At the school she finds herself drawn to a fellow student, unaware that he is an angel, and has loved her for thousands of years.
Rotten Tomatoes gives Fallen a 7% rating. A really unfair 7% rating. Look, the movie starts with a type of introduction that was clearly stolen from the Lord of The Rings intro (I kid you not), complete with a Galadriel-esque voice over and mystique images. Then it proceeds to the teenage-on-earphones driving in scene so reminiscent from Twilight that I didn’t expect too much. All these movies hope to become the sleeper hit that the first Twilight film was, and they all copy at least one or two aspects of that film.
I wasn’t such a fan of the book Fallen when I read it a couple of years ago, but that had more to do with the writing style than the actual content. Also, are all schools for troubled youth beautiful old mansions or is this just Hollywood?
Anyway, Fallen is a surprisingly okay film for the tired Young Adult genre that has seen more misses than hits the last few years. Fatal flaw or not, I have a weakness for these films and always end up getting a copy. They don’t have to be good for everybody for me to give it a chance. There are some scenes which are remarkably silly (angels fighting in clouds), but for the most part I was interested and wanted to keep watching. The chemistry between the three leads are great, and the support cast, notably Lola Kirk as Penn, provided enough color to the film to keep it going. She’s hilarious and did the whole nerdy girl perfectly. Also, the two male parts of the love triangle never gets any real animosity going between them.
I liked the story well enough – the angels who didn’t choose sides when Lucifer and God split were sentenced to earth, and that is where one angel (hint, he’s a handsome blonde teenager), fell in-love with a teenage girl (hint, she’s a beautiful brunette), and as a result, this angel damned all the remaining angels, both good and bad, to a lifetime on earth. They are generically white, light angels versus heavy eyeliner dark makeup so that we can definitely know who is on whose side. Naturally beautiful blonde angel guy is stuck pining for eternity, and every 17 years gets to fall in-love again as his true love meets him and dies as soon as they kiss. Pretty sad, I know. Luckily for us, Luce’s reincarnation this time is “different”, and they share a smooch only to discover that she’s not dying and there is hope for them this time around.
The film has a satisfactory grungy look and tries hard to be hardcore. Since I am about as “hardcore” as a pink marshmallow, I was impressed with the scenes of a metal club (if you can overcome the fact that these troubled teens break out of their dormitory with loud bikes) and found it satisfactorily cool.
I might even pick up the books again to see if they are better this time around. It definitely wasn’t a bad way to spend an hour and thirty minutes, and I won’t scream loudly against picking it up again at some stage.
Rating: 6.5/10
Life of this city girl 