Soul Decision tells the story of Darius, a drunk and confused man, who thinks he is doing okay. However, when a demon shows up to tell him that he’s doing the will of Satan and is headed towards Hell, he finds his beliefs to be in question. At first, he gives in to the guilt of the demon, but an angel shows up and helps him see that he has more options.
From then on, Darius has to decide whether to follow the demon into hell, or to make a choice that will allow him to go to Heaven.
Content
The idea of God and Satan, with their servants of angels and demons battling for the souls of man, is not a new one. Christianity holds that man is born into a sinful nature and must accept the perfect death of Christ for his sins to be restored to God, both in this life and in the afterlife. If a man does not choose to accept Christ’s sacrifice, then he is condemned to spend a hellish eternity, cut off from God, in the company of the only alternative, Satan.
It would seem that D. James Watkins was trying to show a moral story about a man having the choice to serve either God or Satan. However, the story is extremely convoluted and, if I were not aware of the precepts of Christianity, I would have been completely confused. Much of the writing seems too wordy to make the characters and the themes interesting; instead, it seriously confuses the plot of the story and provides stretches of dialogue that quickly lose the interest of the audience. To avoid these problems in future films, I would suggest that the writer read two great books that deal with writing and weaving ethics into your tales: The Short Screenplay by Dan Gurkis and The Moral Premise by Stanley D. Williams.
In addition to the issue of the film’s writing, the editing really gets in the way of story progression, as each cut has about 3-10 extra seconds of silence, before and after each line of dialogue. This causes the story to progress painfully slow, and artificially inflates the running time, which could easily have been less than 25 minutes. To tighten these issues up, the editor needs to remove as much silence as possible for most lines, until the conversation seems to flow smoothly. Then, if there are more dramatic moments, a pause or two can be inserted. As it is, there is no way to tell the normal moments from the dramatic moments, due to the slow pace.
The final problem in the content section for this film revolved around the acting in the film. The performances of the three main actors were very difficult to believe or take seriously, because they appeared to be trying to be as melodramatic as possible. The demon was so melodramatic that she would mispronounce words and snarl to try to sound more devilish. Meanwhile, Darius seemed to be trying to imitate someone who was so stupid that he couldn’t follow any line of dialogue, from either Satan or the Angel, rebutting everyone’s comments with the line, “What do you mean???” or “Why do you say that??” Finally, the Angel seemed to be so saccharinely sweet, that she made a conversation about a girl getting raped and a baby being killed seem like it was a wonderful and sensible idea. Getting believable performances out of your actors is something that really needs to be worked on as a director in future films. A good way to learn the basics of this is to read John Badham’s great book on directing, I'll Be In My Trailer: The Creative Wars Between Directors & Actors.
