The film Fallen is one of the best films dealing with moral issues that has been made in far too long a time. One would think it is merely a film in the supernatural thriller format, a comic book genre, but one would be wrong. It is a detective film but that has always been a specialized variant of the hero myth. It is a deeply complex and disturbing film that has the guts to ask tough questions in an age of easy answers. Fallen brings back the totally unfashionable notion of the existence of evil and forces us to examine what it means in a spiritual sense. It operates in a world dominated by Christian theology but the issues it raises are Universal and Mythical.

The film begins conventionally enough as a detective attends the last request of a convicted killer about to be executed that he be met by the man who captured him. Only a disconcerting green glow that flickers in and out of the frame gives any indication that this is going to be different from the normal crazy-killer-meets-tough-cop routine. John Hobbes played by Denzel Washington is a detective with a sense of grim humor, advising the dead man walking to be careful when he travels. The Killer asks him some puzzling nonsense and is anxiously jittery that he shakes hands with the detective. He also begins to chant a litany in some strange tongue, before switching over into a maddeningly insistent refrain - " Tiiiimmme is on mah siiiiidde, yes it is!" he is still singing that when he is executed.

Denzel Washington is a superbly good actor and he takes us through the initial paces with ease. This is the eighth serial killer he has brought to the executioner; he is something of a media star as a consequence. It is a game for him, a matter of keeping score and proving that he is the best. It is merely a contest and he even likes his opponents- a bit- they give him a chance to show how good he is! Detective Hobbes is not yet a hero, not yet ready for the seriousness of mythic combat, but that will change. He is a person who takes his job very seriously indeed. He is honest, upright and contemptuously tolerant of those cops who find the temptations of the job to be too much. His belief is that the cop on the street is doing a more important job, and more good, every day than most people will in their entire lifetime. As we will learn later, some very important entities believe that too and they are not pleased at all it is so.

The detective has a very good nose and his next murder call sees the same question scrawled on the wall of the victim as was asked by the condemned dead man. "Why is there a space between Lyons and Spakowsky?" He thinks that means the killer had an accomplice who was never apprehended and he has begun a copycat murder run. We in the audience are privy however to what is happening. As the grim voice over says, "Something is always happening, but when it happens people don't see it, understand it, or accept it". Some weird energy is taking over ordinary people and turning them into instant nasties. This transfer is done through touch and there is a visible instantaneous difference in the person last touched. These are some of the most brilliantly shot and choreographed sequences of the movie. The action swirls and twirls like a dance that is visible only the spectator never the participants.

Hobbes learns that the "space in between Lyons and Spakowsky", both cops decorated for valor, belongs to another cop named Milano who was a hero in his day and then mysteriously died in a gun accident that still stinks of a cover up thirty years down the line. Another murder happens by the time he gets to Milano's surviving family, a daughter. She teaches theology at the university in the unnamed city they live in, and she is clearly frightened by his uncovering the can of worms that was her father's death. The professor also seems to know a lot about what happened at the execution without having been there. She is cagey and cleverly uncommunicative though generous with her coffee. She abruptly asks the increasingly puzzled detective an ancient question, " Do you believe in God?" The detective, a good family man who has his mildly retarded brother and nephew live with him, is not so sure that he does though he goes to church. "In my line of work, seeing what I do on a daily basis, faith is a little hard to sustain." Whereupon she wishes him "Good luck" though it seems not the meaningless phrase it has become but a protective benediction.


He is going to need it. An analysis of the videotapes of the executed killer's last hours shows that he was speaking a language almost dead for two thousand years - Syrian Aramaic. The killer was right handed all his life but now he is almost exclusively using his left hand. This is one of the deftest touches to indicate possession - to use what in medieval language was the sinister hand, with its full implications of evil, the 'left' which shares a meaning with 'wrong' as the opposite of 'right'. Hobbes finds that Milano seems to have left some clues as to what he was grappling with in his final days and drives down to the place where he committed suicide. This is a paradoxically beautiful place . Why would anybody come here to die? But within the abandoned cabin, carefully painted over, but equally carefully hinted at, is the name of the enemy. AZAZEL.

Hobbes grapples with the medieval texts left behind by the dead cop ("The basic job human beings have is to figure out what the hell is going on") and he angrily confronts his daughter. Just what is all this about Azazel being the evil spirit of the wilderness and the fallen angels? The theology professor tries to explain that he is in deep over his head and it would be best if he walked away from the case if he had a life or even one person to care for. The professional bloodhound feels insulted at this option, though events prove that it was good advice. The demon has begun to stalk him in sequences of distorted green tinted vision. The spirit of Azazel infiltrates the police station, angry that he is gaining knowledge about the fallen angels. It is one of the scariest sequences you are ever liable to see and there is no violence or gore anywhere. The Spirit leaps from one person into another, singing its theme song about time and then out in the street it gives a bravura demonstration of its strength. It is everybody and nobody, a casual brush of the fingers enough to transfer its host. How does the cop even begin to tackle something like this?

He sgoes back to his source of wisdom, the professor, and is clearly more willing to accept her 'wild' ideas now. She explains that angels exist and some of them are the Fallen. They were punished by God by being deprived of bodily form and they have to inhabit the bodies of other living things if they wish to survive. The preferred choice of host is man. She has been preparing all her life to fight the Fallen Ones. Hobbes is still unsure as to how much of this is true and he is not too impressed with her assurances that there are people out there who are organized to fight them. She says that the right person with the right knowledge and in the right place may be able to destroy them. (Theologically Angels are immortal, not Eternal. That is a big difference. Only God is Eternal, while immortal merely means you will live forever unless killed. It may be exceedingly difficult to do so but the right person can do it.) She is clearly hoping to be that person, and perhaps Hobbes may be one of them. This entire conversation takes place on a giant compass painted into a square and when the camera pulls away we see that Hobbes is standing at the south side, the direction of death. The archetypal imagery is remarkable, whether consciously designed or not.

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