2008-06-27

kateelliott: (Default)
2008-06-27 11:47 pm
Entry tags:

Mongol The Movie

Or:

When you have a perfectly awesome real story, why not totally mess it up with completely idiotic plot elements and unrealistic made up shit?

Wow. Did I hate this film, or what?

And I kept thinking: why why why? How could anyone possibly think the bogus plot was somehow necessary to make the story work as a film?

Let me just throw out a few points:

1)
In a harsh environment mothers typically tell their nine year old sons to "save yourself" and then not see them again for, oh, I dunno, YEARS. Oh god. This is especially aggravating when one of the key elements of Temujin (Genghis Khan's) ACTUAL story is how his mother raised him and his brothers and sister and half brothers after the death of her husband. She was one tough woman. But perhaps they did not want to include the episode where he kills one of his half brothers while still a child.

2)
This weird idea of endless captivities and solo suffering (no, he was never held prisoner in a city; wtf) as the motivator and impetus for All That Comes After is so very bizarre that I genuinely don't understand it. Yes, Temujin was captured one time by another tribe, and not evidently for very long, and when he was by then a youth (no longer a child, not yet quite a man). It matters in his history mostly because the family that helps him escape later is rewarded when he becomes great khan; also, the episode shows how he thinks even as a youth and how he uses his observation of people's behavior and his own persuasive powers to get people to help him.

To me, the way the film devised the plot of endless captivity trivialized the process of complex hostilities and alliances that existed in these inter-related tribes, and the way the size of the local armies of various chiefs and khans diminishes or expands according to their fortunes and successes (or losses) and their other alliances.

3)
Two swords on horseback suicide charge? I don't think so, Tim.

It's late, fortunately for you, or I would go on at length on how much they got wrong.

What was good? landscape: beautiful. details of daily life: cool, but in the background. great faces.

Otherwise, mind-bogglingly dumb plot set atop a choppy narrative.


Oh, the disappointment.