He overlays the film with all sorts of heft and gold but forgets to install the basic cornerstone of a proper epic, which is narrative clarity. Lamangan’s artistic choices are woefully predictable.
Von de Guzman’s score is grand and sweeping, as it should be, perhaps being the only piece in the puzzle that fits the scope of the film’s improperly interpreted ambition. Everything, however, looks manufactured, from the props and sets that feel staged and spurious, to the performances that are drowned by their airs of eminence.Įven Rody Lacap’s usually reliable cinematography is drowned by the insistence to match the look with the film’s being a period piece with obvious desaturation of colors. There is very little aesthetic insight in the film, except anything that will favor the goal of making it appear that the film is true to its factual aspirations. Lamangan here is little more than a paid craftsman, hired not out of his political assertiveness but because of his being quite efficient. (READ: How Dennis Trillo got the role of Felix Manalo in Iglesia ni Cristo movie) It’s quite unfortunate because there is more to Manalo than the shallow pageantry the film serves him. Unfortunately, the film banners Manalo’s accomplishments ahead of his more film-worthy connections with the rest of us, making the film less a penetrating exploration of a man of historical value, and more a protracted advertisement. It contemplates Manalo, as if patterned after Card’s fluent observation on humanity and belief, as somebody who exemplifies that very common facet of being human, which pushes us from a point of uncertainty to undaunted resolve. Softly put, the film has an outline to display a man’s journey and fealty to a certain faith. (WATCH: Dennis Trillo as INC founder in ‘Felix Manalo’ movie trailer) Of course, the themes are tailor-fit to delight its target audience, the stalwart members of the sect Manalo founded, with flowery language, generic drama, and a certain gleam of self-importance, to the dismay of almost everybody else. In between is a hodgepodge of events that can be simplified into three parts, a man who starts questioning beliefs, a man who latches onto a belief he arrives at by divine intervention, and a man who does everything so that that belief can never be questioned. The film begins with the birth of Manalo (Dennis Trillo). The film, directed by Joel Lamangan, is an expected adulation of a man who must have lived a much more complicated life than what this self-proclaimed epic of nearly 3 hours would have its audience believe. The quote from Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead – the sequel of Ender’s Game which now centers on its protagonist who abandons warfare tactics to move from one planet to another to speak with verity about the lives of the dead – could have given screenwriter Bienvenido Santiago a bit of purpose in honoring Felix Manalo, founder of Iglesia ni Cristo. “This is how humans are: We question our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe in, and those we never think to question.”