Perfect cast and a good story

All that we are seeing on the screen is happening with real people, real action sequences in the background, forcing the eye to watch as if we were there.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

I've had a lot of fun with conspiracy theories over the years, I find them rather fascinating. Their psychological underpinnings are pretty intriguing but more than that I look upon conspiracy theorising as an art-form. Sure, a lot of key conspiracy theorist texts claim non fiction status, but to me the product is a nonsense but the production rather wonderful. I like to unpick these grand tapestries, to note the joins where one aspect of history has been stitched to another, where one organisation is sewn to another, all the ways that these theories are put together. And I enjoy writing and cinema that does the same thing, delving into these complex narratives and teasing out reasoning. Revelation gives us a grand conspiracy, perhaps the grandest of all, but never goes deeper, we are expected to simply roll along with it. Trouble is, the general execution just isn't good enough and the film quite rapidly becomes hard to take seriously, progressing into out and out silliness by a third of the way through. And sadly its a sustained and exhausting silliness, not something that especially amuses. The plot outline has young cryptography expert Jake Martel on the trail of a mysterious relic known as the Loculus, accompanied by hot alchemist Mira and priestly tough guy Ray Connolly. And on the dark side is a mysterious cat known as The Grand Master with some pretty nasty methods and underlings. That's the basic drive of the film, a globe trotting adventure that unfolds some pretty wild alternative history as it goes along, the death of Christ, the Knights Templar, occultism and Christianity, Isaac Newton, high level corruption in at least two fairly important organisations and more, its a heady brew that almost totally overpowers the film on a dramatic level because of the regular shots of expository tosh that are required to explain it. Adding to the downer are some rather poor performances, James D'Arcy gives a sub soap opera bland pretty boy performance as Jake, Natasha Wightman does little more than look pretty and weakly pretend to be mysterious as Mira whilst Terence Stamp is dire as one of the important early figure in the tale and Derek Jacobi has an embarrassing cameo. The only people who come off alright are Liam Cunningham as Father Ray, who steers clear of taking his ridiculous character seriously and just as a bit of a ball, and Udo Kier as The Grand Master who gives us his standard but ever entertaining mystery and menace. No one is well served by the writing either, which never fails to be ill thought out and hokey, with a number of plot holes. The film is at least not often boring and one or two scenes are actually reasonably fun, a couple of jolts of nastiness and a crackpot finale being highlights so I cant really give it the lowest grade, but for a film of a fair budget, some fine locations and a lot of potential this really is pretty weak.

This movie will stand as a functional litmus test for years to come. People will be able to see how others react and measure them by their reaction.For there is no doubt that this is one of the worst movies ever made. It could be signed Ed Wood but it's too poor for even that - it's more like artificial wood.It's always hard to single out one culprit when a movie is so painfully embarrassingly poor as this one, and to concoct a product in this extreme category takes the contributions and lack of talent of thousands. Was it the writer? Undoubtedly. Was it the idiot who came up with this idiotic story line? Assuredly? Was it the direction? What direction? Was it the editor? Yes - but what material did the editor Julian Rodd have to work with? And so forth. Everyone can be blamed, and anyone can point a finger at someone else - and they should have been doing a lot of that by now.You will search long and hard for a movie as amateurish as this. Not only is there no continuity in the storytelling, the editing looks like it's been done by an orangutan drunk on absinthe. And when I say bad, you're probably thinking, 'oh that bad is it?' but you would have missed the point. For it's worse. Whatever you're thinking or imagining, think and imagine worse - far worse - and still you won't be close. Did they ever get away with things like this in your kindergarten film school? Nope - kids this bad, be they only 3 - 5 years old, were sent home to their parents and put on bread and water. Get the picture now?In fact the only redeeming feature of this movie - and the only reason we were able to view it and thus review it - was the head of the cast Natasha Wightman. You might recognise her from that horrible adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express from a few years back. The one where Hercule plays with a laptop computer for hours without a battery, without any physical connection to anything, and still basically gets flash-class graphics back that explain the entire story to him. Even Google can't do that. At any rate, Natasha was Mary Debenham, the part played by Vanessa Redgrave in the original (and far better) movie, and she's a lot easier to look at. In fact, Natasha is a 'dish' and the people behind the camera really know how to make her look good - and she really does look good. Of course you'll find her coiffures absolutely impossible given the circumstances she's supposed to be in, but that's the kind of movie you made the mistake of renting. Caveat emptor.PS. You'll find another reviewer here who says the movie was 'well researched'. Remember: it's a 'litmus test'. And that reviewer's test came out the wrong.

As a fan of Udo Kier, if a movie of his comes on the TV, I will watch it. So I watched Revelation, and, not being biased, Udo was a actually the best thing about this movie. Which is odd when you consider that Terence Stamp is in the same movie. But I don't know what happened. Stamp is AWFUL in this movie. Maybe he just couldn't be bothered, but his acting is atrocious. His line delivery is awful! But Revelation isn't that good a movie. And maybe Stamp knew that and so didn't put the effort in.The movie is about some box called the Loculus which has been around since the crucifixion of Christ, and Stamp's character leaves his son Jake (James D'Arcy), and his female friend, to stop the evil Grand Master (Udo Kier) from getting hold of this box.From watching the movie, I would imagine director Stuart Urban probably hasn't had much experience as the whole movie seems a little to student-movie-esquire. The acting from everyone (bar Kier) is atrocious, and a director who can't get a good performance out of Terence Stamp is clearly crap. And there is no chemistry between James D'Arcy and whoever plays the girl at all. The only thing worth watching it for is Udo Kier, he's always been good at playing the bad guy, and the only thing remotely creepy in it are the Grand Master's dogs who move freakishly fast.Overall, unless you are a Kier fan, watching this would be a waste of your time. And it you're a Stamp fan, STEER WELL CLEAR! You'll be completely shocked his acting could stoop so low.

Well - i don't really see why the guy on this page has said so many bad things about this film.I saw it was on so i decided to give it a try - and the interesting start got me into this film, and i kept watching to the end despite being rather tired at the time. This film has a real mix of things in it, and it has like "Wow, i don't actually know whats going to happen next" feel to it.If you like movies and don't notice bad acting or if you are adaptable enough to enjoy films with weird story lines, i recommend you watch this.