The Raven

Wenn in letzter Zeit ein Film aufgetaucht ist, bei dem ich wirklich nicht wusste, ob ich drei oder vier Sterne geben sollte, dann ist es The Raven. Ich erwartete ein entspannteres Thrillererlebnis mit einer großartigen Leistung von John Cusack, und das bekam ich natürlich. Das Thema, nämlich die geheimnisvollen letzten Tage eines berühmten Dichters, hätte natürlich noch besser genutzt werden können und der Filmtitel The Raven fehlt etwas an Begründung. Vielleicht, wenn ein Mord das Symbol dieses Vogels tragen würde, aber das ist nicht passiert. Es wäre vielleicht auch nicht schlimm gewesen, wenn auch Edgar Allan Poe selbst des Mordes verdächtigt worden wäre. Es gab viele Möglichkeiten, wie man mit diesem Thema umgehen konnte, die Schöpfer wählten ihren Weg. Am Ende ist es ein sehr solider Thriller, ähnlich denen, die ich als Kind ständig verfolgt habe. Im Drehbuch finden sich zudem ein paar nette Kniffe und humorvolle Anmerkungen. Na ja, ich weiß nicht, vielleicht füge ich später noch einen Stern hinzu, dieser Film verdient auf jeden Fall eine gute Bewertung. Ich war im Großen und Ganzen zufrieden. (30.04.2012)

In diesem Film hat mir Spannung gefehlt, und zwar sehr. Ansonsten war in The Raven - Prophet des Teufels mehr oder weniger alles richtig. Der sonderliche John Cusack, eine gute Stimmung des 19. Jahrhunderts, welche in passenden Momenten durch Humor entspannt wird, wirkungsvolle Mordszenen (das verschlossene Zimmer, das vielleicht ein bisschen zu blutige Pendel). Die Geschichte war nicht so holprig, wie ich erwartet habe. Aber wie schon gesagt – Spannung konnte man hier keine finden, was bei einem Film, der dem Pionier dieses Genres gewidmet ist, unverzeihlich ist. Ritchies Sherlock Holmes ist in dieser Hinsicht der eindeutige Sieger. Im Vergleich zu dem doofen Film Abraham Lincoln Vampirjäger, den ich vor kurzem gesehen habe, ist aber The Raven - Prophet des Teufels ein überdurchschnittlicher Streifen. Dreieinhalb. (02.12.2012)

It's not completely bad and quite entertaining because it's short, lively, and musically properly dramatic. While the killer can be guessed after a few minutes and everything is basically predictable from beginning to end, it can be managed once thanks to those few camera tricks and fantastic sound and sound effects. There is a certain directorial inexperience and immaturity visible, but The Silence of the Lambs won't be repeated just like that. (07.12.2012)

I wanted to watch The Raven mainly because of the actor, who has been keeping on surprising me lately. Luke Evans was able to put on a show in this movie, too, and he definitely won me over because of it. If I should compare the movie itself to something, it would probably be Anonymous. Because The Raven is a sort of pseudo-historical Edgar Allan Poe’s biopic. But it doesn’t tell his own story, it connects the stories of his individual tales. One murder = one tale. But as a whole, it gives away Edgar, his personality, his opinions and convictions that managed to seep into his tales. And I must say that I loved the idea. The atmosphere of old Baltimore was dark enough and at the same time, I didn’t mind that the entire movie was filmed in Europe, quite the opposite. The only problem with this movie that I minded a lot was the ending. Considering how well the story was developing, the ending has cut it in quite a hard-lined manner. I just wish that a story like this could get a downright epic ending. In the end, I got a rather intimate death acceptance. But that’s probably how it was supposed to be… (01.04.2014)

A horror/crime movie that had the potential to be either a narratological treat (conversion of fiction into reality and vice versa) or the trash flick of the year (bloody killings, a woman in peril, a hard-drinking protagonist). It ultimately turns out to be an arduously mechanical pile of motifs from the works of Edgar Allan Poe. The means of solving the mystery is the author himself, who on several occasions advises the detective on what the murderer is hinting at with which clue, so that the investigators can then join forces and with tremendous accuracy deduce the direction that their investigation should take (the succinctness of the “logical” inferences is in some way reminiscent of The Da Vinci Code). The main storyline is not intertwined with the themes of Poe’s stories, which are simply tossed into it. One Poe allusion is displaced by the next, instead of them being linked together and ultimately leading to the arrest of the murderer, which diminishes the pleasure that comes with the gradual revealing of the truth. In the end, the truth just simply appears. On top of that, every transfer of Poe’s theory into practice is assigned by the characters to a particular literary work, sometimes with a brief historical explanation, so that we can’t even take pleasure from our own knowledge of which source the filmmakers are drawing from. The dynamic link between the author and his work, which in this case is the murderer himself, offers a wealth of supporting themes, but the screenwriters were not able to develop any of them in any sensible way. Nor do they make any attempt to confuse us with the possibility that the author himself might be capable of murder, as his inner demons are very tame due to the spasmodic, forcibly implemented romantic subplot. The more the screenplay tries to characterise Poe on multiple levels, the less convincing the protagonist becomes, so the most entertaining thing here is the initial demo version of the caustic and self-centred alcoholic. A less straightforward approach to the concept of “a film based on motifs from the books of Edgar Allan Poe” is only indicated in the final dialogue scene, which raises the question of who actually the author is and who the reader is. Instead of a well-thought-out game with multiple narrators, of whose rules Poe had a masterful command, McTeigue offers us only a very uninventive and not very dark detective story with a few unnecessary forays into gore and action scenes whose presence could be excused only by a more daring comic-book stylisation (the film wants to look a bit like Sleepy Hollow, but there apparently was no money left over for colour grading in post-production). 50% (23.04.2012)