There is a lot of bad pseudo-theology about death.  In the West, much of this has been borrowed from Christianity.  People have taken whatever pieces of the religion, broadly speaking, that fits their fancy, and specifically about what Christians have taught about the afterlife.  My grandmother liked to refer to such people as “Cafeteria Catholics,” the kind that show up for Mass on Christmas and Easter, and decide what parts of the Faith with which they will agree.  Returning to what happens to us when we die, there are the common stereotypes like getting your angel wings or meeting St. Peter at the pearly gates for those behaved like good little boys and girls.  There is an alternative, and that, too, is associated with all kinds of nonsense that culture has erroneously injected into our collective thinking on these serious matters.  Death is not a subject we like to dwell on, and yet those of us who are Catholics are called upon to pray about it daily.  It is a preparation that will hopefully render your soul ready to meet Him, no matter how long it takes, when that proverbial time comes.  Still, nothing will get you ready for the assault on the body, mind, and soul that is the recent re-imagining of The Crow (2024).

While I have no idea who is the little boy helping a horse at the beginning, or who the people are in the nearby trailer, there is The Crow nearby, or I should say crows.  After we see this, and the opening credits, we cut to Zadie (Isabella Wei), making a frantic call to her friend Shelly Webster (FKA Twigs).  Zadie has texted Shelly a video with something on it that they, and certain powers that be, do not want anyone to remember.  As Shelly is wondering about the wisdom of keeping the clip at all, Zadie’s end goes silent as she is confronted by those “certain powers” in her apartment.  For reasons at which I can only speculate, Shelly decides to go to Zadie’s place.  Along the way, Shelly notices a shady figure following her and sensibly bumps into a pair of police officers.  Actually, perhaps this move is not so sensible as illicit drugs spill from her purse and she is arrested.  We next get to meet the titular character, Eric Draven (Bill Skarsgård), who is in a rehabilitation facility.  Or is it a prison?  I guess it is both because this is where Shelly is also sent because in this strange cinematic world, men and women are kept under lock and key in the same building while undergoing treatment.  As they are settling in and getting to know one another, we are finally introduced to the villain, Vincent Roeg (Danny Huston).  He is part crime lord, part immortal being who has made a deal with the devil to send souls to hell in exchange for eternal life.  He does this last bit by whispering something into the ears of his victims, which gets them to do his dirty work for him.  He is on the video Zadie sent to Shelly, and unfathomably he wants this evidence destroyed.  You might think that it could be turned into the police, but he appears to have all of them in his employ.  Anyway, he gets Zadie to kill herself before demanding that his right-hand woman, Marion (Laura Birn), find Shelly so that she can suffer a similar fate.  I guess using their connections amongst the authorities, they track Shelly to the rehab jail just as her and Eric are getting close.  He decides to help her escape detection, and together they make their way to freedom and apparently nobody is too bothered by this event.  We spend the following several minutes watching these supposedly rehabilitated young lovers do every drug imaginable, make music, and pledge their eternal love for one another.  Things are going well until Dom (Sebastian Orozco) shows up saying that Marion has found them.  Who is Dom?  He is the guy that took the MacGuffin video, but we learn little else about him.  Eric and Shelly decide to escape, but are unable to do so before being found by Marion and her cronies.  Eric and Shelly are murdered together, and this is when things go completely bonkers.  After watching Shelly be sucked down to the netherworld, Eric comes to in some kind of limbo that looks like where all the abandoned factories of the afterlife have been left to rot.  There he is greeted by a person the credits list as Kronos (Sami Bouajila), though dash if his name is ever mentioned in the film.  Kronos informs Eric that his and Shelly’s murders, because of their love, demands vengeance.  As long as Eric’s feelings for Shelly remain pure, he will not die until they are re-united.  Thus begins revenge quest 2024 as Eric slowly learns that every injury that befalls him is healed moments later.  However, when he finally sees the clip that has everyone so worked up, it changes how he feels about Shelly.  Despite her obviously being put up to the stabbing she perpetrates as seen in the recording, he believes he has been betrayed because she had not told him about this crime.  As such, the next time he is shot, he dies, only to be reunited with Kronos.  Whoever this guy is, he tells Eric that the young man has failed.  Instead of “moving on,” whatever that means, he makes his own deal, trading her soul for his own.  Kronos informs Eric that this means he will never again be with Shelly, but he agrees to do it anyway.  Now Eric is truly on the warpath, killing his way through an opera house (amazingly without disrupting the performance) before cutting off Marion’s head.  He gets Vincent’s whereabouts from Marion prior to taking her life.  Vincent is expecting him, planning to use his powers in some unexplained way for himself.  Instead, they end up where Eric first encountered Kronos.  In this realm, Eric is able to send Vincent to the underworld, and brings up Shelly in his enemy’s place.  They share an embrace until she is sent back to when and where she first died, and Eric walks off in the in-between, or whatever.

I guess because Shelly comes back to life at a point that is in the middle of The Crow’s plot, then none of the rest of the stuff that happens is real?  Vincent is still alive?  I have so many questions, and not just about the ending.  One you might be asking is how it compares to the original 1994 version?  The first, while I still do not think it should be seen by anyone, is so bad as to be funny at times.  This one is depressing and overly violent.  It is so strange to me, to return to what I began discussing in the introduction, that it would bring up things live the devil and hell, but say nothing about the opposite, that being God.  You may accuse me of reading too much into what is presented, but at one point Eric asks Kronos if the granter of superpowers is an angel.  Kronos scoffs, asking if he looks like an angel.  He does not, and I hope and pray that Heaven is nothing like the post-industrial landscape Eric is apparently destined to wander for the rest of eternity, or until Shelly dies.  Who knows?  Who cares?  Overall, there is a lot that does not make sense in this movie, but the biggest one is that God is left out of the proceedings.  Aside from the evident blasphemy, I can think of no crueler world than one where there is no evident good to counter evident evil.  If you happen to see this film, first, I am sorry.  Secondly, I would counter another argument you could pose here by saying that Kronos represents a “higher power.”  At one point, he tells Eric that it is time to “move on,” the seeming implication being eternal rest but not in hell.  Before Eric can accomplish this, though, he must get his revenge, and that is also not Godly.

One of the arguably frustrating things about a film like The Crow is when one of the characters says something that piques my Catholic interest.  For most of the time, I sat in my chair hemming and hawing and wondering when the proceedings were going to get anywhere.  And then Kronos comes along and tells Eric that the enemy of love is doubt.  Before continuing, please again keep in mind that Kronos is not meant to be seen as God.  While, I suppose, anything is possible, none of what we see in this film lines up with Christian teaching.  At the same time, Kronos uses terms that would be familiar to any true follower of Jesus.  He taught us to love one another.  He did not say to murder your fellow man when shady characters kill your loved ones.  These concepts are obvious to anyone who practices the Faith, but movies like this, as I have hinted at throughout, make me wonder what parts of religion people decide to use, and why they do so this erroneously.  Yes, God is love.  This is found in Scripture and has been backed up through the whole spiritual history of the Church, which carries on to this day.  But this is not meant to be some kind of philosophical catchall.  To be fair to the movie, Eric performs a selfless act by sacrificing his temporal chance at happiness with Shelly so that she might live.  It is refreshing in this narrow sense to see some sliver of Christian culture make its way unadulterated onto the silver screen.  Martyrdom is a beautiful thing, and one that should not be sought out, which is what happens here.  As for “doubt,” the only thing I can connect this concept to is my own as to anyone liking this movie.  Doubt is the enemy of Faith, though its true meaning is almost completely absent to those who made this film.

The fact that God is so far from The Crow is the main reason why you should not watch it.  God is bigger than our tiny brains, and only slightly bigger hearts, can ever contain.  However, God did not leave us fumbling in the dark, which is apparently what happened to the writers of this movie.  Faith is either completely true, or not at all, which is why a movie like this can be so annoying.  Avoid.