Kohtalon kirja

If you're a masokist, do watch the movie. Other than that I would never suggest to anyone that they should watch this movie.

Bad acting, even worse story line. I was amazed how mad it really was.

There are different episodes with one central character, or his reincarnations.. the guy is supposed to save the world with the book of fate. Now, as the previous commentator noted, the movie is pretty much awful. It could have been put together a whole lot nicer, as the effects and some of the scenes and makeup is nicely done. What I personally see as the biggest tragedy in all of this is that Finland has never produced anything quite like The Book of Fate, and maybe the guys tried too much to fit everything there and in the end all future financing for similar movies will be withdrawn. Which is a pity.

With more proficiency, it could have been shown all around the world. Veteran actors and the guy playing the reincarnation man as well as his eternal girlfriend do their job adequately, but the bottom line is, seems like the overall story just remains obscure and doesn't engage the viewer enough.

Plus you can't dazzle the audience by offering them inferior copies of Matrix, Dracula or Unforgiven all spliced together.. simply doesn't work.

I think this movie was fairly good when you think that this was as far as I know graduate work for some filmography students from Tampere polytechnic. For that I would give this movie grade 9. But as for commercial release on other hand I must place this below mediocre movie for apparently not so professional end product. But they show lots of potential for future though.

Plot in summary:

Priest finds The Book of Destiny(Kohtalon Kirja) and ends up to adventure in time to save whole universe. This movie mixes many types of movie genres in rather interesting way. Maybe we will see version made with big money some day ;-)

A couple of months ago my friends were talking about the new Finnish fantasy film Kohtalon Kirja. I have to say that I did not expect much from the movie, but I also didn't expect anything this bad.

There is absolutely nothing good to say about the film. The acting is terrible. Even the famous Finnish veteran actors sounded like amateurs. Visual look of the film is beyond description and the soundtrack had some worst heavy metal music I have ever heard.

But the real reason I hate the film so much is the action. It was obvious that many of the actors had no training in any martial art. Even the most basic training would have made a big difference. All the moves in the fight scenes were slow and painfully clumsy.

This film isn't even funny as a bad trash movie. It is just bad. Avoid it like a plaque.

Take a number of Finnish art students and an ambitious exam project combining some major genres of action films: horror, western, war, spy thriller and space adventure built into one storyline and then try to make a feature length film with no time, no funding and actors working for peanuts; then you will get The Book of Fate.

Considering the above-mentioned factors the result is not as awful as could be expected, I have seen numerous films made with much bigger budgets by professional crews that were worse by far.

The idea behind the film: creating a framework for action sequences in different times and different settings is interesting although not worked out well enough. Most of the hand to hand fighting sequences are not well done, they might have worked better in slow motion. Other parts (the shooting fights mostly) were not that bad. Other than that the sets and the effects were reasonably well done. If the inexperienced main cast had had more time to get into their roles (the inexperienced director might have done a better job) and the supporting veteran actors had put in more effort, the story would have been more believable.

In all, I would not suggest you build your evening on this flick, but if you have the choice between this one and reality TV shows, you might want to opt for this "fan film" product.