Watch out! There’s a ten ton statue sneaking up behind you!
Oh, ouch. That’ll teach you to be competent at your job.
If your cup of tea is watching cheap knock-offs of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), then Ba’al: The Storm God (2008) might be right up your alley. We start off with a murderous robbery of an archaeology museum, which, despite being slightly clever, did make me laugh out loud. Why did that damn statue fall over and kill the security guard?
It seemed unjust after him being quite competent and all.
Anyways, a bunch of Dead Sea Scrolls are stolen – it’s not entirely clear why the digital versions available online couldn’t be used – and, the dead left behind to rot, the local cops are left to figure out who pulled the robbery.
Just about everyone here is a PhD, mostly of the archaeology variety, although we do get a meteorologist as well. Anyways, the oldest of the bunch, highly respected Stanford, has been frantically digging in Inuit territory (that would be the Arctic Circle), and in the midst of a requested visit by Helm, your generic and doctrinaire archaeologist and Brendan Frazier lookalike – except tubbier – and Carol (I can’t find her last name), a Sumerian cuneiform expert who, thank goodness, doesn’t get engaged in some horrific romantic subplot, and who’s mystified that she’s been requested to visit the Arctic when her specialty should take her to Iraq, virtually the antipodes of the Arctic Circle.
But even as they arrive and meet guards with rifles and bad tempers, an amulet covered in, insert your guess here, is discovered, comes to life, and zaps Stanford, who has an epileptic fit. But while he survives, a monstrous, and do I mean monstrous, storm roars in and wipes out the encampment. But, of course, the archaeologists escape.
Stanford is running things, and now they’re flying somewhere else. Why? Well, that damn amulet has some companion amulets, and, well, Stanford has cancer and thinks the amulets will cure it.
What?
Meanwhile, the American military has been watching as these absolutely monstrous storms pop up at each amulet site, even if they don’t know about supernatural storms. They bring in an independent meteorologist with expertise in upper atmosphere storms, and she thinks the storms are hooked into the Van Allen radiation belts (a real thing) and will draw infinite power (not a real thing) from them and soon we’ll be just like the Great Red Spot of Jupiter (a real thing, although shrinking recently), enveloped in one hellish storm.
She should have gone with a Venusian analogy, instead.
Anyways, deities appear, they have fights, a nuclear bomb plays a part, the cops get sucked into a vortex, and it’s all very silly.
The problems start with the story. It’s a fantasy, a genre which must explore the foibles of mankind, and necessarily their consequences. In Raiders, we see the Nazis in their arrogance, the mercenary French archaeologist Belloq who values his prizes and power over human life, Jones’ preoccupation with getting the treasure, and the general inclination for various assistants to go for the money.
Here? Stanford is weakly motivated, since there’s no obvious connection between Ba’al and curing Stanford’s cancer. Nor do Helm or Carol have much in the way of foibles. The meteorologist, Pena, has just a little bit of backstory, as she has been banned from the military base for misdeeds involving high tech, but it really goes nowhere.
And the actors are more or less sleep-walking through their roles, with the exception of the commanding officer, Kittrick, who properly projects military command presence throughout, even when admitting he ordered a plane into one of the storms, and lost it and the crew. But, honestly, these actors didn’t have much to work with.
Don’t waste your time on this one. It’s just good enough to tickle you along, but, in the end, it’s not in the least memorable, and you’ll want your time back.
Go see Raiders again, instead.
