End of Days (1999)

The magnitude of what you just mentioned is captivating. “End of Days” begins with a description of a priest who, from his window in the Vatican, sees a comet seemingly forming an eyebrow above the moon. During the scene, he rushes to a wooden chest, where he takes out a silver container, which has a scroll inside. Upon taking the scroll out, he unrolls it, and yes! A drawing of a comet arches over the moon, resembling an eyebrow! It is clear that this drawing depicts the dreadful celestial display known as the ‘Eye of God.’ In disbelief, the priest rushes into the chamber of the Vatican where the pope sits in guards and says, “The child will be born today!” While cutting to ‘New City, 1979,’ there is a live childbirth scene where the nurse commands the mom to push! A baby girl is born; a nurse takes the infant in its swaddling clothes and races to a basement room in the hospital. The nurse anoints the child with the blood of a freshly killed rattlesnake before bringing the child back to the mother.

At this moment, I am preemptively asking myself, where is William Donohue when we require his service? Why is it that his Catholic League mocks an innocent comedy “Dogma,” but allows “End of Days” which teaches us that once every thousand years a woman comes into the world who, if in the last hour of the millennium, she gets impregnated by the Prince of Darkness, she will give birth to the Anti-Christ that will initiate…yes, end of days? But in the meantime, a woman is being hunted down, the Pope wants the Vatican Civil War to cease, and the murder isn’t undertaken just due to faith in God? The woman if murdered of course would be a sin, but perhaps justifiable under the circumstances especially since the humble instrument chosen by God to save the universe is an alcoholic bodyguard named Jericho Cane, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger. Jericho and his partner Chicago (Kevin Pollak) find themselves investigating a puzzling series of events, including a man with his tongue removed who still manages to shout a warning before being nailed to the ceiling of his hospital room.

Indeed, Jericho’s question does reveal a gap in the overall story behind the scenes. ‘End of Days’ is no stranger to exhibiting ‘too clever for its own good’ overtones, especially since it attempts to be self-aware despite positioning itself as a straightforward slasher movie. Whatever ‘fun’ they intended to have while sorting through the plot reasoning for such a loony timeline came off as half-baked. Not exactly at a deep enough level to be entertaining and not superficial enough to be easily dismissed. This fun planning didn’t quite catch up with them, since they forgot that they have built a world where the Prince of Darkness must execute his plan at the last minute before the new millennium is announced. As they are utilizing a scream-queen goal, it becomes evident that solving the plot and logic issues never crossed their minds. There are just too many interlocking pieces out of sync to feel genuine.

Let’s analyze this. Rome is 7 hours ahead of New York. To put it differently, those clever monks stated, “The infant will be conceived from 6 till 7 a.m., January 1, Rome time, which will be between 11 p.m. and 12 a.m. in a city that doesn’t exist yet, on a continent we are utterly oblivious to. And that world is round? Well, it would be unacceptable to suggest that there are varying times in various places as the world revolves around the sun.” No wonder they devised Gregorian chants to relieve the stress when losing sleep over these puzzling questions.

Blending the ridiculous and mixes the otherworldly with “End of Days” as a demon-like creature that resembles Gabriel Byrne stalks a twenty-year-old Christine (Robin Tunney) during her stay in Manhattan, while Jericho attempts to ensure her safety. The all-American conflict, Schwarzenegger style, involves managing a critical of a man hanging onto a helicopter and the first one dooming themselves across a Manhattan skyline. Let’s not forget the scene where there is a high-rise window that a character hangs onto for dear life, while a subway derails and contains an explosion followed by fireballs going off across square blocks of Manhattan. The otherworld power dissipating is only one part of Frieden. This sparks a new chain of concerns surrounding violence and the existence of moral codes. It begs the question: what are the laws of physics to this Byrne? “The Man”, the name he is credited under, is in my belief the avatar of evil, Satan himself but is shown to possess variable strength. When Jericho shoots him, the Man’s magic sends him flying backward which allows us the opportunity to see his shirt more. And when Jericho switches to a machine gun, he is thrown backward and seemingly sent into hibernation for some time.

And that means what exactly? Is there a limit on how much anti-injury mojo he can accumulate in a millennium? The last battle of the movie serves as a counterpart to the new 2000 year‘s Times Square countdown. It wouldn’t be too polite to remind everyone that the new millennium’s first day is actually the last day of the 2000, which is on January 1. Even then, ‘End of Days’ would find a loophole. This is the first movie that argues convincingly that the marker of Satan ‘666’ is, in fact, ‘999’ upside down, and all it takes is adding a to get to ‘1999.’

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