FALLEN: A Ridiculous, Derivative, Yet Somehow Endearing Mess

Ever since the wildly popular The Hunger Games have come closest. The Divergent films started strongly, but then petered out to the point that the last entry was released only on VOD. And then there are all the attempts that didn’t even get a sequel: Beautiful Creatures, The Mortal Instruments, The Golden Compass, The Host, Ender’s Game, and many, many more. It seems that for every Harry Potter, there are ten Inkhearts.

You can’t blame them for keeping at it. It’s lottery-players logic. Sure, the chances at success are tiny, but the potential rewards are so massive and glittering, that it’s surely worth a go. Isn’t it? Fallen certainly seems to think so.

Fallen

After a mysterious incident, sixteen year-old Lucinda Price (Addison Timlin) arrives at the Sword & Cross Reform School. Though it’s a school for troubled and in some cases, dangerous adolescents, Lucinda is fairly even keeled, apart from the hallucinations she calls ‘Shadows’ that have acquired their own body count.

At Sword & Cross, she soon makes friends with the sweet-natured Penn (Lola Kirke) and Todd (Chris Ashby). Not everyone is so amiable however; Molly (Sianoa Smit-McPhee) takes an instant, violent, dislike to Lucinda, and a whole other group give her a wide berth.

Who bothers her most though is the aloof Daniel (Jeremy Irvine). From the moment she meets him, Lucinda feels like she’s known him forever. Is it just a crush? Or is there something deeper to their relationship?

Twilight Redux

Of all the YA adaptations you can compare Fallen too, by far the best fit is Twilight. A mortal girl falling for an immortal boy, the competing supernatural factions, the love triangle; if you squint a little, Addison Timlin and Jeremy Irvine even look like Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson.

Like Twilight, and all these series, Fallen is adapted from a book franchise. Written by Lauren Kate, the original novel spawned three sequels, and sold millions of copies all around the world. It was a massive hit by any standard. So why is it that the film looks so unlikely to replicate that success, or indeed, the success of Twilight?

Well firstly, it’s that similarity. The only substantive difference between Twilight and Fallen is that the former is about vampires and the latter is about fallen angels. But whereas Twilight has fun with its mythology, Fallen wears it heavily. It’s convoluted and confusing, despite being explained to death. The film opens with an explanatory video that frankly lost me by its end. Handily though, the mythology is explained and repeated, by multiple characters, until the closing credits.

After days of avoiding her, Daniel has his first proper conversation with Lucinda. He tells her what the whole deal is, by pretending to explain the plot of a graphic novel that he’s writing. We, as an audience, get what he’s trying to say, and initially it seems that she does too. But then the next time its explained to her, she reacts like she’s hearing new information. Throughout, the screenwriters struggle to get a handle on the difference between what the audience knows and what the characters know, and the result is a frustrating amount of over-explanation.

And then there’s the problem facing a lot of these YA adaptations. At the time of production it’s uncertain as to whether they will get a sequel or not, which puts them in a tough position. Revealing too much too soon could put potential future instalments in jeopardy. But leaving too much hanging, including any sort of cliffhanger, and then never making a sequel, makes the experience of watching that one film profoundly unsatisfying. Fallen is beset by that latter issue.

Finally there’s the CGI . As the identities of these angels are hidden from our main character for most of the duration, there’s not a whole lot of CGI in this film, which judging from the little we see, is a blessing. The reveal of what the angels wings look like is distinctly underwhelming. And that’s before you even get to the final angel-on-angel battle scene, in a sky that looks as convincingly real as Donald Trump’s hair. Most of the movie is bad, but that final sequence (capped with a “Maybe we’ll get a sequel?” cliff-hanger ending), is just embarrassing.

Saving Grace

As much as Fallen is an objectively bad film, it’s a hard one to hate. This is largely thanks to the sterling work of Lola Kirke, who may as well be wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with “Too Good For This”, in every one of her scenes.

It helps that she is given the best lines, but it’s also in her delivery. Throughout all of Fallen‘s numerous, preposterous twists and turns, she remains convincing and sympathetic. When she meets Lucinda in the bathroom and seems pathologically unable to stop talking, when she falls for Todd, in a plot-necessitated instant, when she professes her undying support for Lucinda at every possible opportunity; she is eminently believable at all times. She elevates what is often ludicrous material into something worth caring about. She is great. She needs a better agent, but she is great.

This isn’t to say that the rest of the cast is terrible, though most of them do suffer from aborted franchise syndrome. Many of the named characters only have a line or two here, but would have gone on to have bigger parts if lightening had struck and there had been another film. That has the unfortunate result of almost all of the characters being underwritten.

The cast do the best with what they’ve got, and they all escape the disaster relatively unscathed. This is largely thanks to the earnestness with which they approach the film. No one seems to be phoning it in, or embarrassed to be speaking lines that frequently veer into the ridiculous. Though the relationship between Lucinda and Daniel is boring, it’s not primarily the fault of the actors; Timlin and Irvine are clearly trying, but it isn’t enough to overcome Fallen‘s manifold issues.

In Conclusion

If Fallen gets a sequel, I will be amazed. It’s nothing but a weaker version of everything that has come before it, the mythos is convoluted and ultimately uninteresting, the CGI is ropey at best, all the characters but one are one-dimensional carbon-copies. It’s hard to see what’s there that would inspire legions of young adults to part with their pocket money and flock to the cinema in the way they did with Twilight and Harry Potter.

Despite a winning performance from Lola Kirke, it looks like Fallen‘s destiny is to be assigned to the scrapheap of YA movie history, along with its similarly derivative brothers and sisters. Hey, it’s no great loss. But there’s something about the earnestness that every line in the movie is delivered with that makes its failure a little sad.

What’s your favourite YA adaptation?

Fallen is out now on VOD in the UK, and on the 8th of September in the US. For all future release dates, click here.