Just saw it - and its absolutely awful

I can't remember the last time I actually started a post here, but after reading all the excitement on the boards about Pope Joan here, I feel compelled to write something.

I have just seen this film a couple of hours ago at the Camerimage Film festival in Lodz Poland, and the pre-buzz was pretty big. The poster looked great, and people who had seen the trailer talked alot about it. Hell, the people at the door were even telling the audience to put down their laptops, cameras, phones etc as the security for the film not being filmed and landing on the internet was huge and a demand from the distributor. Well it made sense afterwards, because if anyone saw just a couple of minutes of this torture they would surely stay way.

I won't get into the story too much, lets just sum it up that this is a film set in the 800-eds about Joan, who has a huge crush on the bible and learning, and works her way up to become the only(possibly) female pope ever by disguising herself as a man.

That said and done, and sounding like a pretty good story for a movie, is about the only good thing there is here. First off, the writing.

The people who wrote this, some guy and the male director, obviously don't know much about women, more than how to spew out some kind of flat , one-dimensional portrayal - probably the way they see women in real life. The screenplay has "written by a man" all over it when it comes to the the female characters, and to be honest the male too, who pretty much all are black-or-white cut out cardboards. The father of Joan is a monster, the love interest sweeter than sugar, the conspirators very evil with bald patches of hair and deep voices, the mother a weakling, the pope a buffoon, etc etc. There is not a single nuanced character or performance in the entire film. NOT ONE. That said, just looking at the casting gives you slight Uwe Boll chills as the actors are all either well past their best-before date and misplaced (John Goodman), characters-clones from different films (Faramir) or just miscast (Joanna Wokalek, who was great in Baadeer Meinhof btw, is frickin 34 years old!!! Playing a 16 year old or thereabouts for about half of the movie!!)

Not that this film has any concerns with age and logic anyway. Both Joan and Faramir look exactly the same the whole film despite a great number of years passing by.

The dialogue is both horribly written and performed, and there doesn't seem to be any form of consensus by the makers to what "type" of english they should use (as the film is in english). Forget the whole Gladiator-thing where you didn't mind the actors speaking english because all the ingredients like writing and acting were good, here its all awful.

My biggest problem though was probably however the screenplay and the so-called writers just insulting the audience over and over. Logic definitely does not live here. Couple of examples;

A scholar comes to teach young Joans brother in the ways of reading and the bible. He has secretly been teaching Joan this as well, and she uses the moment to say a couple of phrases in latin and talks around them. The guy is stunned, and from this one minute conversation mutters deeply to himself -"I shall teach her", and then goes on to pretty much devoting his life to her, as that was enough time to separate real talent and genius from luck.

Joans younger brother is riding to a monastery through some deep woods. The rider is shot and the brother ends up on the ground. During nightfall Joan having walked all the way from her village, with a secret compass in her head and through mind reading that he is in danger, finds him there. Just awful.

Joan kisses Faramir at some obscure lake god knows where, and, of course, some evil cloister-munk is there to witness it.

It just goes on and on and is very bad writing. Also the camera and lighting is overly cheesy, the voice-over is a killer as it often tells the most obvious things.

Overall, the film looks, feels, and sounds cheap. Like something that needed much more money but didn't have it so every single shortcut available was taken, from actors, to pre-production, to costumes etc. In the end it wouldn't have mattered much with this screenplay and director, but it felt like an episode of Rome, just worse and cheaper.

It also didn't have much shame as it tried to rip off everything from Elizabeth to Braveheart (I actually shouted "Thats stolen from Braveheart!" at a scene where Faramir returns some dried flowers to Joan that he has saved through the years, by pure disgust-reflex) and if fails at every instant in lifting something good.

I could go on and on but won't waste the time. Its a 2/10 for me, and a weak 2 at that. Only reason its not a 1 is because I can actually think of a worse film I have seen this year, but this one is not far off.

Anyways, sorry to blow it all for you who have been waiting and seem excited, but if you are still going to see it, at least be prepared for an abomination. You won't feel cheated.