Claire Marie-Peterson

It's a good instance of its genre. I loved the life-sized shooting gallery in the bottled-water plant. I especially appreciated the mirroring of the title in the development of the main characters, all of whom are fortresses who have a hard time "letting people in." More could have been done with that; I didn't think those story lines were resolved. My main problem with the movie is that I felt as if I were watching three headline actors doing their usual thing. That works fine for Connery and Harmon, but not for Ryan. She's too cute and vulnerable to be the character the script seems to call for.

Grating soundtrack, incomprehensible dialogue, implausible medieval social structure cast ten thousand years into the future, characters and plot about which I couldn't care less. It was the most miserable 2 hours and 35 minutes I can ever recall spending in a theater.

Despite its score, which is beautifully performed, the movie is a truly insidious treatment of Christian faith. It would have been so much better had the candle and angel claptrap been exposed as a quaint fiction that pales in the presence of actual Christian faith. Perhaps the most insidious detail is that a woman who has inherited wealth and privilege is offered up as the pinacle of "faith," her wealth the evidence of "miracles" granted by God through belief in the magic candle. The movie touches on the true blessings of prayer rightly understood as loving conversation with God, but that message is cheapened by the suggestion that prayer, when aided by the magic candle, is a way to get God to give you stuff.

Maybe absurdist humor is just the right medicine to break up the deadening drumbeat of militarism. Any art that opens up the collective imagination to alternative ways to resolve conflict is a good thing in my book!