Fire, water, wind, earth and emptiness... Five core elements of life that once inspired a book. The Book of Fate. Far away from here there was a mythical world -free of suffering and injustice. But it wasn't enough. People wanted to play God... They created a pen to control the Book of Fate. Mightier than a sword, it could write off deeds -and bring back the dead. But the book gave power, power caused fear -and fear brought suffering. And the suffering caused wars. Darkness fell on earth, making demands on the pen and the book. But the book was gone. It was thought to be lost forever -but hundreds of years later it reappeared on a small planet called Earth. The prophecy says: Only the chosen will get a second chance from the book. The destiny of the chosen one is to guide the book back. But his journey will be long, filled with errors and grief. This is his story.
Juha-Pekka Mikkola
as Viktor Konstantinov / Muukalainen / Viljo Ronkainen / Henri Lillqvist / Apollo
Reviews
Pretty Good
Overrated
It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.
Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.
Kohtalon Kirja makes a grand attempt of featuring almost every genre of film 'not' inherent to the Finnish Movie Canon. While the makers are to be commended for their efforts the result is a lot less than the sum of its parts.Kohtalon Kirja is an episodic movie where each story ends at a cliffhanger which is resolved by the film's end. Despite the level of effort in ensuring the high production values and the support of, undoubtedly, some famous Finnish actors the problem with the film's plot is that it feels very indifferent. The same goes for the actor-performances which all lack any sort of genuine emotion.At its best the film is perhaps even slightly farcical and definitely over-dramatic and entertaining. At its worst it feels like a joke which isn't nearly as funny as the film-makers intended. A film worth watching as an ambitious experimentation in Finnish film-making, but one which falls short of the dynamic of Jade Warrior or the energy and craft of Star Wreck.
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.
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 ;-)
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.
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