If you’re a regular around Cinema Blend you know there is practically a stand-alone category of movies that wind up being reviewed by me. Typically they aren’t very good movies, like the PG-13 horror movies that are hastily thrown together to attract the teenage crowd, usually without much concern for plot or story. The Messengers was one of last year’s entries in this category, a movie that couldn’t figure out what genre it belonged in and was so forgettable I had to double check my own review to make sure I had seen it.
Forgettable though it may be, The Messengers apparently made enough money to get a second movie green-lit – a prequel which is slated to start filming any time now. We already got a rough idea of what the movie would be about when the studio first announced the project, going back to reveal the story of John Rollins, a farmer struggling to keep his farm afloat and his family together. Now we’ve gotten even more of an idea what you can expect from the movie based on some leaked script pages shared with us from one of our anonymous scoopers.
At first glance, it looks like this prequel is leaving a lot of the supernatural elements of The Messengers behind – something the original movie should have done anyway. Instead we see a lot of John Rollins' deteriorating sanity, a la The Shining’s Jack Torrence. In the isolation of the farm’s fields – fields which are withering away thanks to poor weather and a surplus of crows – it looks like John is slowly going quite mad.
John has more problems than just failing crops, however. He’s married to a woman he got pregnant early on, and the pages show he carries some regret about this even though sixteen years have passed by. Over the course of the story, both John and his wife (Mary) suffer infidelities, both of which look to be pretty major plot points. I’m fairly certain the script will have to be tamed down from its current state, especially in the case of John’s torrid affair with Miranda, another farmer’s wife who describes how wet seeing John gets her. I just can’t see that playing well in a PG-13 environment like the first film.
The resolution to John’s problems come in the shape of a scarecrow, which (by appearances) serves as the movie’s link to the supernatural. This makes perfect sense considering the nearly-unjustifiable use of crows in the first movie. Again, this is something the studio pretty much said in the original description of the sequel, but the script really plays with this. I’m hoping whoever films the movie can build suspense the same way it plays on the page, because there’s a lot of possibility for a Shining approach, wondering whether this scarecrow is really supernatural or whether it’s an element of John’s crumbling sanity, right to the end, especially as characters point out that the scarecrow is helping clear out John’s obstacles and distractions. Could it be John is resolving his own problems or are there actual supernatural forces at play?
Sadly, anyone who saw the first movie probably can answer most of these questions, assuming the movie sticks to the franchise rules established by its predecessor (that isn’t supported by the script pages we’ve seen by the way, just speculation on my part). If it doesn’t stick to those rules, well, it might actually be a better idea to drop the Messengers title and just release this as a separate movie. The Messengers didn’t exactly draw a huge crowd and, as pointed out before, was pretty forgettable. This little glimpse at The Messengers 2 holds a bit more promise and potential if it can be executed as a primarily-psychological thriller, at least based on what we’ve seen.
