City of Angels (1998)

  Today is my friend Kristen's birthday!  This was one of her favorite movies when we were in high school together, if I remember correctly.  I must have heard that Goo Goo Dolls song a bazillion times in her car.  If I was a good friend, I would point out how, even though I didn't personally like the movie, I will always have a soft spot for it because of the associated memories of my friend.  But I'm not, so instead I'm going to talk about how much this movie sucks.

Sorry, Kristen.  Happy birthday, anyway.

First:  a basic rundown of the plot.  Seth (Nicholas Cage) is one of the angels who escorts the souls of the dying, silently observing humanity with the other host.  He is fascinated by humans, at how quick and vibrant their lives are, but things reach a critical point when he meets Dr. Maggie Rice (Meg Ryan), a cardiothoracic surgeon.  Maggie is undergoing her own crisis after having lost a patient on the OR table so when this strange man shows up, she is actually comforted by his presence, which allows her to go forward and operate on the next one, Nathaniel Messenger (Dennis Franz).  Nathaniel is actually aware of the angel in the room because he used to be one, and he tells Seth that he knows a way for Seth and the pretty doctor to live happily ever after.  All he has to do is Fall and then he will become human.

Here's my problem.  I actually had to do a shit-ton of research on angels and their fallen cohorts for an as-yet unpublished novel.  Most of the really cool stuff never made it into the final cut of the Bible and was relegated to the Gnostic gospels.  The Book of Enoch, in particular, talks about the angels and what happened to them.  Now, I am by no means an expert in Christian theology before anybody jumps all over me, but not a single text I read had anything good to say about an angel falling from grace.  This movie blatantly ignores everything religious about an entity whose entire existence is from religion. 

Viewed in that light, it's impossible for me to see this film as anything but a horror movie about the dangers of getting too close and losing your objectivity.  Because I'm fairly sure that Dennis Franz's character is actually the devil.  Think about it.  He has previously fallen and shows up to tempt Seth by dangling a perfect solution:  give up being an angel and you can have the woman of your dreams.  And Seth falls for it, forgetting that a whole wave of angels did that way back in the day, coming down to Earth and getting it on with human women to breed a race of giants.  Goliath was a descendent of one of these unholy unions and we all know what happened to him.

So this is why I didn't like this movie.  They took a key element of Christian iconography and completely secularized it.  Gone is any indication that Seth's actions were a violation of a basic tenet in favor of the completely ridiculous notion that you can fuck an angel with zero consequences.  Dude gave up an eternity at God's side to become a starting forward on Lucifer's team, all for some Meg Ryan ass.  I don't care how cute her hair was in the 90's, that is not a good trade.