Risen

You'd be forgiven for thinking this was a straight-to-video Sci-Fi Channel video given the quality of effects and what is it with directors and actors stretching out movements and dialogue? Is it to get the film to 90+ minutes? This was a decent idea, nothing new, but had potential to be a better tale. Turned into a hard watch.

...less painful and infinitely more interesting hemorrhoids than this movie. They went away quicker, too, while this movie seemed to drag on forever.

The background music is far too intense and loud. There's lots of information spoken in the background that cannot be properly heard because of the loud music. A great film idea, poorly executed.

The movie had so much potential, the handling of the situation failed miserably. The whole scientific approach was laughable really, the alleged scientist spent the entire film feeling sorry for herself why they gave us no clue to that. The concept of the film could have been really great but it lacked passion, emotion and feelings at all.

The final act of this film is one of the most incompetently handled endings I've ever watched. The problem is that films tend to work to a tried and tested 3 act structure. The first act sets up the world the characters and their goals, 2nd act raises the stakes for our characters by way of obstacles for them to overcome, 3rd act resolves the story with either a win or a loss. Not all films work to this structure but most of them do. This film resolved the main plot during the 2nd act which left the 3rd act with nothing left to do, so the 3rd act is just endless exposition told through voiceovers and flashbacks with nothing to drive the plot forward because the main plot has already been resolved, and this amounts to a boring 3rd act for the viewer, there's a revelation about a character in the 3rd act but trust me by the time it happens you're not going to care.

Now the actual story itself I thought was quite interesting. It was set up well enough in the first act to grab my attention, and even despite some dodgy acting in places and the usual pitfalls you get with low budget sci-fi films I was still invested in the film well into the 2nd act because of the story, but then the scene happened where the film should have ended but didn't and the rest of the film after that was a real slog to sit through as it crawled slowly towards the end credits.

I think you could re-edit this film into something quite watchable, cut up the 3rd act and splice it into the first two acts, move around a few scenes, it's never going to be a masterpiece but I think you could easily turn it into something much better than what I just watched.