When you set out to adapt a best-selling spiritual book into a movie, it's kind of a double-edged sword. You have a built-in audience for your film, but by tailoring your film for that audience, you risk not reaching a wider one. The Celestine Prophecy might please diehard fans of James Redfield's initially self-published, best-selling book, but anyone else is likely to sit there watching in absolute befuddlement as characters prattle on in stilted dialogue about energy fields and insights while assorted baddies -- government soldiers, armed-to-the-teeth rebels AND a Catholic Cardinal -- blow up buses and ancient ruins, shoot and kidnap people, and generally run all amok doing dastardly bad-guy deeds, in an effort to keep people from spreading the word about these ancient "insights". And that's unfortunate, because the message in Redfield's book: slow down, learn to appreciate the coincidences and beauty in life, and learn to touch God directly from within yourself, is a message that a lot of people in our increasingly violent and volatile world could stand to hear. Before I get a bunch of nasty comments from Redfield fans about this review, let me disclaim here: I am a fan of the book (or at least the ideas presented in the book, if not the quality of the writing) and I'd hoped the movie would be really well done. Unfortunately, it just wasn't.

The film suffers on several fronts. First, its New Age-metaphysics wrapped in supposed-thriller format comes across as rather contrived in the book; in the movie, it seems even more absurd. The idea that the Catholic Church and Peruvian government would kill and destroy to suppress the nine scrolls that contain the "prophecy" feels rather ludicrous; there are countless books at my local new-age bookstore that sell many of the same ideas presented in these insights, and last time I checked, there were no armed soldiers or sinister church officials preventing them from being freely available to anyone with a debit card. Redfield was so heavily influenced by various spiritual traditions that there is little in the insights that hasn't already been hashed and rehashed by everyone from Deepak Chopra to Ken Wilber to the Dalai Lama. If the Catholic Church was really going to go all ballistic over the revelatory insight that human conflict and interaction is really about the giving and taking of energy, there are a hell of a lot of people they'd have to kill and suppress.

The whole thing also just seems rather dated. When you wait a decade to make a movie from a book like this, you risk the "who cares" factor; even folks like me who read and liked the book years ago are likely to scratch our heads and think, "why wait so long?" Then on top of that, by opening the movie around the same time The Da Vinci Code is coming out, with its higher budget, big name stars, and big-name director, you're bound to be hammered with comparisons, in this case largely unfavorable. I expect Da Vinci, in spite of Tom Hanks having perhaps the worst hairstyle of his entire career (and I'm counting the Bosom Buddies days here), to be tolerably good or at least watchable. I'd hoped the same of The Celestine Prophecy, because in spite of the rather pedantic writing of the book, it does present some interesting and timely ideas about human conflict and potential. Not totally original ideas, to be sure, but certainly the ideas in The Celestine Prophecy are considerably more accessible to the average person than, say, sloughing your way through Ken Wilber's Sex, Ecology and Spirituality or The Tibetan Book of the Dead. 

Without giving away too much, for those who haven't read the book, here's the basic storyline: after getting canned from his teaching job, John (Matthew Settle) gets a call out-of-the-blue from Charlene (Robyn Cohen), a woman he hasn't seen in years. Charlene has a layover in town, and feels oddly compelled to tell John about a mysterious manuscript she heard about in Peru. Charlene urges John to go to Peru to learn more about it, and after a series of coincidences, John finds himself on a plane to Peru, where he meets Dobsen, a professor also heading to Peru because of the manuscript. Before John even has time to unpack, Dobsen has been unceremoniously carted off by the Peruvian police, and John manages to escape. He's rescued out of the blue by a stranger named Wil, who is also connected to the Manuscript, and embarks on a harrowing life-or-death adventure, on his way to becoming enlightened. Adventure ensues.

Visually, the film has the look and feel of a Tori Spelling made-for-TV movie, which may be in no small part due to the fact that the director, Armand Mastroianni, has done nothing but television until this film. That might also explain the horrendously choppy editing; it often feels as though entire scenes ended up being taken out without regard for continuity and flow. It almost feels like the film was edited with a television run in mind -- you can practically feel the <insert commercial here> slots in the script.  The Celestine Prophecy, as translated to film, should have a dreamy, ethereal quality that is, with the exception of some saturated colors and a halo filter, mostly lacking in this incarnation. Vision is the job of the director, and Mastroianni just doesn't do a very good job of bringing it to life. For a film like this, you need a director who understands how to take something rather abstract and emotive and translate that to a visual medium. It's a task that requires a certain ability to visualize that Mastroianni seems to be lacking. As I was watching the film, I kept thinking of how much better visually  it could have been in the hands of Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Science of Sleep) or Spike Jones (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation) or even Vincent Ward (What Dreams May Come).

Additionally, the film suffers from the same problem the book did (well, besides woefully inadequate writing): it tries too hard to be too many things. It wants to be a thriller ala The Da Vinci Code, full of conspiracy theory and the big, bad Catholic Church keeping the power from the people, and rich guys colluding with the military to keep the world a Bad Place; it also wants to communicate the ideas behind the insights, and all the running around being chased by bad guys distracts miserably from this. The concept of the insights is explained in much greater clarity in the book, and much of that is lost in the translation to film.

I thought when I first read The Celestine Prophecy six years ago that it was an interesting concept wrapped in an unnecessarily fantastical package. Redfield rather reminded me of James Twyman, the New-Age troubadour who claims to have met psychic children in Bulgaria being trained in a secret monastery.  Twyman was behind another spiritual film, the well-meaning but equally amateurish Indigo (2003), and the ideas presented in both films are along the same continuum. Energy fields, indigo children, a growing awareness of what energy and matter really are, quantum physics merging science and religion in ways we are only beginning to understand -- these are fascinating and timely topics, to be sure.  If ideas like those presented in this film are going to reach above the bar of "preaching to the choir" to touch the minds and hearts of people who aren't already true believers, though, they need to be presented in ways that are both entertaining, intelligent and professional. This film, unfortunately, pretty much fails on all those levels.