Here is the epic biopic of Genghis Khan, a man so prodigious as to be the apparent ancestor of millions of current humans, yet presented so purely that he is only seen here sleeping with his beloved wife. As Braveheart is to the Scots, so this myth-like tale is to the Mongolians. However, since the tale ends midway through the life of its hero, rather than giving him a Jesus-like sendoff, the myth is incomplete. Punctuated with period violent episodes, this production from Kazakhstan earned a foreign-language film Oscar nomination, and certainly the production values are there, but it’s the sort of old-fashioned epic where, were it about George Washington, it would mention the episode about chopping down the cherry tree, but not the one where he had deserters shot during the Revolutionary War. Still, not bad, and there’s some impressive shots of the steppes of Central Asia.
IMDB link
viewed 7/9/08 at Ritz East; reviewed 7/10/08
Showing posts with label warrior. Show all posts
Showing posts with label warrior. Show all posts
Friday, June 20, 2008
Friday, March 7, 2008
10,000 BC (**1/2)
Wouldn’t it be interesting to know what life was like 12,000 years ago? Suffice it to say that director Roland Emmerich (The Day After Tomorrow, Independence Day) likely didn’t burden himself with mounds of research in trying to depict his vision of things. (Unusually, Emmerich’s screenwriting partner, Harald Kloser, is the film score’s composer, making his first foray into words along with music.) The result is a hodgepodge of ideas that might have been gathered from surveying a group of high schoolers. Weren’t there mammoths back then? Yes, there were, and so Emmerich’s story envisions a legend, narrated by Omar Sharif, of Asiatic hunter-gatherers who may be doomed by their reliance on hunting beasts with legs the size of men. The hunting sequence in the first half hour of the movie is probably the most stirring. Later on, we also see some creatures that look like a kind of small dinosaur/bird hybrid.
The main story, though, concerns the efforts of one of the hunters (Steven Strait) to free others of his tribe who’ve been kidnapped by “four-legged demons” to the south. Principally, he aims to prove his loyalty to the beautiful Evolet (Camilla Belle), whose maidenhood is threatened at every turn. He braves every hardship to achieve this goal, not unlike the way Dennis Quaid did to rescue his son in The Day After Tomorrow. Besides that, his trek affords the filmmakers to show all manner of terrain, from ice and snow in the beginning to forest, and to desert, and then to gather up a multicultural lot to fight a final battle, not unlike the militia Mel Gibson gathers up in Emmerich’s The Patriot. They wind up finally in a place that seems like Egypt, complete with what appears to be a pyramid being built some thousands of years before historians tell us that happened, but hey, who knows?
As for the women, we see about three of them. Apparently, their main role was to stir the courage of young men (or the loins of older men) or to serve as seers. The plot’s reliance on the gifts of one such sorceress is perhaps the thing that I found most tedious about the tale, but I admit I have a low threshold for such fancies. Ultimately, 10,000 BC is best enjoyed as a special-effects spectacle, like Emmerich's contemporary films, only with the characters using dialogue like “I am through with days.”
IMDB link
viewed 3/8/08; reviewed 3/17/08
The main story, though, concerns the efforts of one of the hunters (Steven Strait) to free others of his tribe who’ve been kidnapped by “four-legged demons” to the south. Principally, he aims to prove his loyalty to the beautiful Evolet (Camilla Belle), whose maidenhood is threatened at every turn. He braves every hardship to achieve this goal, not unlike the way Dennis Quaid did to rescue his son in The Day After Tomorrow. Besides that, his trek affords the filmmakers to show all manner of terrain, from ice and snow in the beginning to forest, and to desert, and then to gather up a multicultural lot to fight a final battle, not unlike the militia Mel Gibson gathers up in Emmerich’s The Patriot. They wind up finally in a place that seems like Egypt, complete with what appears to be a pyramid being built some thousands of years before historians tell us that happened, but hey, who knows?
As for the women, we see about three of them. Apparently, their main role was to stir the courage of young men (or the loins of older men) or to serve as seers. The plot’s reliance on the gifts of one such sorceress is perhaps the thing that I found most tedious about the tale, but I admit I have a low threshold for such fancies. Ultimately, 10,000 BC is best enjoyed as a special-effects spectacle, like Emmerich's contemporary films, only with the characters using dialogue like “I am through with days.”
IMDB link
viewed 3/8/08; reviewed 3/17/08
Friday, November 16, 2007
Beowulf (**3/4)
Ah, how well I remember not reading this back in high school when it, the earliest classic of English literature, was assigned. If only there’d been a movie version. Now there is this, one of a few adaptations in the last decade, but let us not speak of the gloomy, dreadful 13th Warrior (1999), the only other one I’ve seen. Here we have director Robert Zemeckis (Who Framed Roger Rabbit?) working from a script by fantasy polymath Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary.
This quasi-animated version (enhanced live action) preserves the shell of the ancient story, set in sixth-century Scandinavia, while filling the center with something new. There is the monster Grendel, all right, the one thing I vaguely recalled from class, and his reign of terror upon a king and his people is what sets the story in motion. Beowulf (Ray Winstone) is the warrior who answers King Hrothgar’s (Anthony Hopkins) call for a hero. In this telling he is met not only with the beast, who comes looking like a giant man whose skin has been flayed, but by beauty, which looks a lot like what today we might call Angelina Jolie. The tale, then, is of bravery mixed with temptation, which is the new part.
The frame is sturdy, the look shiny and sharp, especially if you get to see the 3-D version, as I did not, and the climax, a one-on-one war of man and beast, rousing. There is one larger-scale battle sequence, but it’s short, and overall the movie’s only mildly action-oriented. What prevents it from being more memorable is that the temptation theme is not well-developed. A tragedy of weakness and redemption seems intended, but as the years skip by we really don’t see its full weight. Epic grandeur is needed, and lacking. Whereas perhaps we are to see Beowulf as a Samson figure succumbing to the charms of Delilah, I saw him more as Bill Clinton succumbing to the charms of Monica Lewinsky.
By no means is the film a failure, or dull. But it lacks the mythic power of 300, a rough analog of heroism and self-sacrifice set in a semi-mythic past.
This quasi-animated version (enhanced live action) preserves the shell of the ancient story, set in sixth-century Scandinavia, while filling the center with something new. There is the monster Grendel, all right, the one thing I vaguely recalled from class, and his reign of terror upon a king and his people is what sets the story in motion. Beowulf (Ray Winstone) is the warrior who answers King Hrothgar’s (Anthony Hopkins) call for a hero. In this telling he is met not only with the beast, who comes looking like a giant man whose skin has been flayed, but by beauty, which looks a lot like what today we might call Angelina Jolie. The tale, then, is of bravery mixed with temptation, which is the new part.
The frame is sturdy, the look shiny and sharp, especially if you get to see the 3-D version, as I did not, and the climax, a one-on-one war of man and beast, rousing. There is one larger-scale battle sequence, but it’s short, and overall the movie’s only mildly action-oriented. What prevents it from being more memorable is that the temptation theme is not well-developed. A tragedy of weakness and redemption seems intended, but as the years skip by we really don’t see its full weight. Epic grandeur is needed, and lacking. Whereas perhaps we are to see Beowulf as a Samson figure succumbing to the charms of Delilah, I saw him more as Bill Clinton succumbing to the charms of Monica Lewinsky.
By no means is the film a failure, or dull. But it lacks the mythic power of 300, a rough analog of heroism and self-sacrifice set in a semi-mythic past.
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