Mongol

Its been a while since I’ve been so awed by a movie that I was rushing home to write about it. I’ve been excited for Mongol since I saw the first trailers for it. It took a while for Mongol to get to the US, and even after its June 6th release in the states it was limited, making this movie very difficult to find.

I went into this movie with very little knowledge about the actual history behind the story, but then again if I wanted a history lesson or to write a criticism then I could of just turned on the History Channel and griped about inaccuracies. But this movie was far too good for such trivial complaints.

Mongol was not just a drama, nor just a romance, nor just a gruesome battle. No, this was truly the epic tale of the early life of Genghis Khan. His rise to power and the incredible hardship he faced. This movie has me jittery from beginning to end. Director Sergei Bodrov really captured the Mongolian steppes with flawless sets and design, the characters each so unique and believable that if I had been told that I was in fact in Mongolia I probably would have believed it, were it not for the heat in Palo Alto. Otherwise I could practically smell the horses, and feel the bone shattering blows.

Tadanobu Asano plays the role of Genghis Khan and from beginning to end I liked him. Through the course of the film there is a very apparent progression of his character, which in this case was the only one I felt needed to change.
The gorgeous supporting actress Khulan Chuluun plays Borte, the wife of Genghis. I loved her character because she was a strong supporting role and an important character, but never stole the spotlight, despite being such an excellent character. I also liked how throughout the movie the relationship between Genghis and Borte stays as an ever present constant through the epic ordeal. I also hope to see Khulan Chuluun in more films as this is her first movie, and she did an excellent job.

The battles in Mongol were excellent, they were brutal and on a massive scale, but one thing the fights in this movie had over other films was a sense of mortality that I think a lot of films lack. I never felt as though one side or the other had some godlike superiority like in 300 or Lord of the Rings.

I cant express how beautiful the movie was, the scenes were seamless and the characters were always dirty, and I was never left wondering where they found time to wash their cloths. The tribal feeling was very strong and believable, and the villains were never without a sense of reason.

I didn’t have much to criticize on Mongol, the film was perhaps a little jerky and sometimes made cuts that left me trying to catch up and figure out what was happening. I felt that it faded from scene to scene too often and I sometimes lost sense of time and didn’t really know how much time had past from the last scene. There were maybe a few things that could have possibly been done better. But otherwise Mongol is truly an epic film that I would recommend to anyone.