This film attempts to marry the symbolic, metaphysical cinema of filmmakers like Alejandro Jodorowsky with the big-budget, religious stupidity of films like The Omen (1976; dir. Richard Donner) or Holocaust 2000 (1977, dir. Alberto De Martino). The outcome is an uneasy mix of Islam, misogyny and apocalyptic doom-saying. Some individual sequences captivate and disturb – the eclipse that becomes a skull, the flashback amongst the salt lakes – but the tone is sombre and weighty without any pertinence to back it up.

Cinema that uses symbolism or allegory needs to be able to state its aim convincingly off-screen – the simple fact of the filmmakers’ knowing their own goal adds conviction to the proceedings regardless of whether the audience are aware of that goal or not – but Born of Fire is all too obviously without purpose; its (admittedly arresting) imagery devoid of true meaning and thus relevance and importance to the viewer. The end product is a retread of countless other ‘good-versus-evil’ plots, welded onto an unfortunate, and highly dubious, religious mythos.

Born of Fire at the IMDb