The Age of Commercialism

Sadly Over-hyped

Crappy film

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

Slow moving, and when it does moves along, it seems to leave out crucial information at times. Not sure if it was Mongolian habit 800 years ago, but half the killings are because of a woman, and half are to revenge one man's brother. Only in the final battle is it for power. One gets a sense of deja vu afterwards with him being captured so many times and all under very similar circumstances.

When people talk about " The greatest military strategist of all time " we often hear of the Eurocentric view with people such as Napoleon and Alexander The Great being mentioned . Genghis Khan sometimes gets brought up but perhaps it's because he's Asiatic and perceived as being a barbarian that he doesn't get name checked more often . The fact that his hordes started off on the Mongolian plains of East Asia and managed to get as far as Poland in an era when logistics and force projection were primitive to non existent was an almost superhuman feat . This film is about the early life of Khan What struck me about MONGOL is that it feels on a narrative level something similar to a Western . Young Khan sees a person close to him as a child murdered and he vows revenge . As the boy turns in to a man then a man has got to do what a man has got to do . There is a very strong element of Khan being a nomadic stranger and having to protect homesteaders from the bad guys but there's a slight difference that Khan's brutality and thirst of conquest goes way beyond the anti-heroism seen with Clint Eastwood starring in a movie directed by Sergio Leone It's a film directed by Russian Sergey Bodrov and occasionally I have the pleasure of discussing cinema with professional critics . One of them , an affable gentleman called David Wingrove . described the films of Michael Powell as " Pastoral Gothic " but that phrase could be accurately used more in discussing Russian cinema where the camera lovingly lingers on rural landscapes where humanity is a mere tiny spec of the bigger aspect of nature . One pivotal scene sees the young Khan arrive a temple and is watched by a wolf and while it then cuts to another scene therefore leaving Khan's predicament unexplained which sums up the film where the narrative is somewhat jarring but is compensated but its concentration of the metaphysical almost mystical beauty of nature

This is one hella great epic movie. Great art of photography indeed, the scenery of the landscape grabs the audience attention on the visible beauty of the Mongolian plains. Their culture and language were as if purify.This film is the finest film of the century. It even reveals great values such as loyalty, trustworthy, code of honor. Although Borte was raped or the child not belong to Temudjin – he treated them as his without any biases.Temudjin portrays more of his kindness and generosity than barbarism nor tyranny. He treated his people and warriors with compassionate and equal. Yet all of this were shown in the film before the closing scene states that he finally what the world all knew him as the Great Khan conqueror: Genghis Khan!

Remember the spoof play in The Producers called "Springtime for Hitler," whose absurd theme was to portray Hitler in an overly gleeful musical. The musical was absurd because most consider its happy-go-lucky subject to be the worst man of the 20th century. Mongol takes on the subject of Genghis Khan, who many consider to be the worst man in all history. He united the tribes of Mongolia and went on a rampage across Asia and Europe that puts Hitler to shame. Yet, Mongol portrays this "worst man ever" as a sensitive people-loving individual who always puts his moral sensibilities ahead of his own self-interests. In short, it's about a guy who is the opposite of Genghis Khan. Rather than the shrewd and calculating genius that we are led to believe he was in the history books, Mongol shows Genghis Khan (or Temudgin) to be a bit of a chronic loser whose bad luck or bad decisions are constantly putting him at the mercy of others. His moral clarity and lack of tact not only put him at odds with both allies and enemies in this movie, but also with the real Genghis Khan. The movie supposedly covers the early years of Temudgin up until the time that he united the tribes of Mongolia. However, very little uniting is done and most of the movie is spent with Temudgin simply surviving by himself as best he can. As a viewer, you're always wondering when he's going to turn it around and start winning. But the losing streak continues for the vast majority of this 2 hour movie until Temudgin hits rock bottom, loses everything, and is sold into Chinese slavery. Yes, Chinese slavery. Meanwhile, his wife ends up bearing children to a wealthy Chinese man. I know that there is very little written about this time in history and that the writers had considerable leeway to make up just about anything, but you have to be kidding me. The whole story seems like an elaborate stretch of the imagination designed to appease the Chinese audience by allowing them to claim that the later Mongolian rulers of China were really Chinese after all. So how does Genghis Khan go from Chinese slavery to leader of the Mongolian people? I still don't know. The movie skips that part. He gets freed by his wife, runs off by himself, and the next scene shows him several years later as leader of a large army ready to fight the final battle. No explanation is given for how this happened. That's a lost opportunity because the story of how Genghis Khan united the tribes hasn't really been told, not even in the history books. The writers had the creative freedom to come up with any engaging story about a very interesting time in history. Instead, they decided to gloss over it and focus on the "sentimental" aspects of Genghis Khan, as if there were any. I have to conclude that Mongol is a nice story about some guy that is not Genghis Khan.But if you're the type of person that can see past the implausible history and you simply want to watch an epic story with cool action scenes, you must know that the action scenes have some of the most distracting special effects that I have ever seen in a movie. They are riddled with cheesy cartoon blood splatter. Every cut from a weapon results in way too much animated blood spray. It may sound a little immature to complain about the bad special effects of the blood in a movie like this, but it really is so bad that you almost want to fast forward through the action scenes. The rule that, bad special effects are worse than no special effects, was not heeded here and you will be scratching your head thinking, "Why did they do this?" I was thinking that a lot as I watched Mongol.