The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

It is a truism that it takes a lot of effort to make a bad movie - this one is no exception.I am no lover of yanks but their amazingly simplistic view of the world and their ability to reduce everything to black and white as well as make events (even fictional ones in novels) fit an agenda that bears little or no relationship to complexity of any kind is irritating in the extreme.Wilbur Smith is descriptively verbose but weaves intricate tales that deserve more than has been delivered by this awful mishmash of a movie.Sad really for those who will never read Smith. They will be left with a less than decent portrayal of his Egyptian series, which has to be said is gigantic in its exposition.The Indiana Jones movies were snappy. To attempt to replicate that by manipulating Smith's novels into this production misses out by a country mile.Pathetic except for the photography and Art Malik.

After reading both _River_God_ and _The_Seventh_Scroll_, I can't begin to express how disappointed I was with this film. While I agree some poetic license may be admissible, this movie is at constant variance with the books, doing an incredible injustice to the exciting, plausible and wonderful stories written by Wilbur Smith. I can only believe that the writers, director and producers of the movie have never even heard of Mr. Smith, let alone read his work. Smith's vibrant characterizations are converted into wooden stick figures, all historicity is ignored or discounted, the realism of the books has been changed to include phantom monsters more appropriate to a cartoon. And why is an Egyptian henchman speaking Spanish? Geesh, no wonder the movie was made into a TV miniseries! Did Wilbur Smith have any input into the making of this movie? I can't believe that he did. Terrible, terrible movie. If you've read either or both of the books, don't waste your time or money watching this money. You will be sorely disappointed, I assure you.Only a moment of supreme generosity persuaded me to give this movie a ranking of '2', and that only because of the beautiful, sometimes spectacular, photography.

Well, I've read the book first and thought: wow would this be cool to see in a movie, than I started searching and found there was already a movie made of it... I bought the movie a week ago on DVD and watched it.. they did it awfully wrong! at first this kid Hapi,who isn't any character in the book, then the mix between the two books ('the river god' and 'the seventh scroll') than Nicolas needing funds while in the book he himself is actually the funder, the whole thing about the Hyksos is wrong also.. Taila is supposed to have invented the lightweight-chariot.. the whole thing about the tomb is also very wrong.. there is supposed to be a channel that has some kind of vacuum-suction around it.. the tomb itself was made in a maze with only a possibility to pass if one knows the rules of the ancient boa-game. There was nothing in the movie about Nicolas being English and Royan was a Coptic-Christian in the book, not a Muslim..This list is endless.. There were only a few things good about the movie, the actors which played Royan, Nahood, Taita, Boris, Mick and Tessay were well-chosen, the rest were just parodies of the characters in the book, Rasfer was the worst, it didn't get even close to the character that was in my head while I wrote the book.. It is such a shame that such a great book is mutilated in such a bad reproduction... I wonder why Wilbur Smith ever gave his permission for this..

If you are a real Wilbur Smith fan, The Seventh Scroll TV mini series will probably be very hard to watch till the end. At least, for me it was. The script is way too simple; a lot of times the dialogs do not fit the character speaking, especially hapi's dialog. Besides that, the acting is unrealistic. For example, the "bad guys" at the beginning of the film look more like a caricatures then criminals. The only actor giving away some form of performance it the one playing Taita. He is probably also the one with a script closest to the text from the books. If only a real movie director would have the courage to take on of Wilbur Smiths series and make it into one or more descent movies...