From my favorite movies..

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

The production of this series is top notch and a treat. The sets, the snow, the costumes, everything is brilliant.The casting and acting are respectable as well, although I'd have liked to see a taller, fitter Peter. At one point an out of shape Schell huffs while liting an axe then wields it with the wrong hand. Peter, always described as tall, strong and with boundless energy, would disapprove.What truly lets down this series however is the scriptwriting. Here you have a great story, a stellar cast, and all the right ingredients, but the screenplay is a series of shockingly fake sounding set pieces. It's just a mystery to me with all the nice things this movie has to offer why they couldnt have come up with a better script. After the battle of Poltava, Menshikov says to Peter, "You have saved Moscow" and Peter says, "We have secured our access to the sea". Really? You're gonna announce the conclusions of a battle you just fought like you wrote a term paper? This sort of thing abounds in the series. Another example is the highly unnecessary and historically doubtful "Peter in Newton's lab" scene. It's like their research dug up that Newton was around at the same time Peter was in England, and hey let's have them meet. Then it's also the struggle between keeping things chronological yet interesting, which kinda falls flat. Peter talks about St. Petersburg from a rather early age, and builds it only towards the end of the movie. It's never really shown. That is like one of his most interesting achievements and the screenplay pays it the usual lip service.This could have been so much better.

For me Peter the Great was excellent. It is the kind of topic and life that the mini-series concept was invented. It would take six hours to go into both the policy achievements of his reign and the various struggles for power with all the intrigue surrounding them during his reign.Peter Romanov, Peter the first of Russia was born to Czar Alexis who was the second Czar under the new Romanov dynasty. Alexis had two wives and Peter was born to his second wife. Alexis had several children by both wives, but only two sons, one by each wife. Peter was clearly the one with the abilities and personality to rule, but Ivan who most charitably can be described as a dullard, but dullards have their uses if they can be manipulated by ambitious people. Maximilian Schell plays Peter as an adult and the mini-series allows him to develop all facets of his character. The western quarter of Moscow intrigued him, the foreign colony where people dressed so differently and seem to be always innovating. His Russia resisted all change be it technological, be it fashion, be it in its special brand of Christianity the Russian Orthodox Church. Because of that they were hemmed in and he decided things had to change. He meets resistance with those with a built in interest for resistance and the general inertia. But before he's done he has a modern army and navy, a new capital and functioning seaport on the Baltic named St. Petersburg, and certain changes in fashion come to at least the intelligentsia of the regime.But history has its ironies and Peter who won the succession battle dies without a named heir and for the next 15 years there are several czars among Peter's descendants until 1740 when his daughter Elizabeth becomes Empress and has a 22 year reign that was very popular. He also married twice and the children of both wives were rivals. Peter had a son also named Alexis and that proves to be the biggest tragedy of his reign.Some familiar faces are in the cast in supporting roles. Peter made a grand tour of Europe the first czar to see what was beyond Russia's borders. He met with such people Isaac Newton played by Trevor Howard, King Frederick William of Prussia played by Mel Ferrer and a much too old Laurence Olivier playing William of Orange King of Great Britain and Statholder of the Netherlands. If I had to single out one in the cast for special praise it would be Vanessa Redgrave as Peter's scheming half sister Princess Sophia.If you find that Peter The Great resembles I Claudius you'll be in agreement with me. What this series does represent is fine history and fine entertainment.

Nobody mentioned in their reviews that the wonderful Lilli Palmer played Natalia, the mother of Peter the Great, which gave her a golden globe nomination for best support, though she died before the TV miniseries aired on TV... Yes this was her last performance after a Forty year career in films TV and theater around the world.. She is terrific and her last scene, her death scene, is particularly poignant.. There has been criticism that the miniseries is not historically correct. OK but its a miniseries, not a serious documentary and so poetic justice is expected and acceptable. They did get the idea of who Peter was and what he did for Russia and that is what is most important. A wonderful cast in this lavish production and a marvelous chance to see the still beautiful Miss Palmer in her last role, even though she was already apparently dying of cancer and quite ill during the shoot. IT is a shame she did not live to see her nomination, which she lost.

(Some historical spoilers, lest the unwary are taken in by this serial!) I first saw this on BBC1 in 1987, shortly before beginning my doctoral research on the historical iconography of the Petrine era, and it stood me in good stead as an unintentionally comic point of reference. Nikolai I, with his cult of Official Nationality and near-deification of Peter, would have *loved* this series; this viewer, however...Chronology, geography and characters are wilfully distorted, sometimes to comic effect. General Gordon, who strangely appears *without* an Aberdeenshire accent, gets to bed a Swedish belle - loosely based on Aurora von Königsmarck - and fight at Narva several years *after* his death. Peter picks up his future second wife at Azov, instead of in Peterburg after the Baltic campaigns. Tsarevich Aleksei, actually an 8 year old, is shown as a grown man at the time of the execution of the Strel'tsy and the banishment of his mother! But more often than not, the distortions are to show Peter in the best light possible. The reforming Regent Sof'ya and her highly Westernised, intellectual adviser Golitsyn are shown as conspiratorial opponents of change. (The casting of Vanessa Redgrave as Sof'ya is amusing if you know the portraits of the real Sof'ya, a decidedly plump young woman.) Evdokiya, Peter's harmless first wife, is depicted as a treacherous, frigid shrew. Tsarevich Aleksei - scholarly, consumptive, abused Aleksei - is played by Boris Plotnikov (who was superb as the Christ-like partisan hero of 'The Ascent' - did he need hard currency so badly to appear in this?) as a geeky, reactionary schemer with a terrible haircut. (Aleksei was actually strikingly handsome, with huge brown eyes and long dark curls.) Meanwhile, the corrupt, power-hungry Menshikov and duplicitous, torturing Tolstoi are depicted as lovable rogues, and Marta/Ekaterina as decidedly wholesome... The tough (and prematurely balding) young Swedish soldier-king Carl XII, who resembled a shorter Max von Sydow, is depicted as a vaguely camp cherub with golden curls. All stuff which would have gone down well with Nikolai I-era or Soviet historiography, but not with modern scholars in Western Europe or Russia.The series leaves a nasty taste with its automatic demonisation of anyone who tried to resist Peter: "blaming the victim" writ large. It even tries to enlist viewers' sympathy for him while he's watching his own son being tortured! The script is also clichéd and awkward ("I'll drag you kicking and screaming into the modern world!" says Peter on one occasion). Characters are depicted wandering around in traditional dress long after the Court had been dragooned into Western clothes, and there is no depiction of 'Sankt-Peterburg' itself, although it is talked about.If you have a warped and twisted sense of humour, this series is actually very funny, like 'Blackadder' played by a cast who don't realise it's a comedy. That's why I'm giving it 3/10, instead of just 1 - for black humour value. I had to laugh at it, or I'd have thrown a brick through the TV. The BBC's own, much lower-budget production, 'Peter in Paradise' (2003), is superior, as is the 1996 Russian film 'Tsarevich Aleksei', based on Merezhkovskii's novel.