It's sad to see the director of the small and wonderful Prisoner of the Mountain making an empty-headed epic like this, rather akin to the fall into big-budget rubbish of Yimou Zhang; both men seem to be now producing State Propaganda film, which imply that the deaths of millions are merely historical necessities on the road to some creepy form of Utopian "unification". I suppose that you could be kind and see Mongol as a non-historical "emblematic" story about staying true to what you believe in, but then again its not really healthy to take a warlord and marauding Empire machine as a role model? You might as well make a film which shows Vlad the Impaler in the same light, never mind Stalin or Hitler.
There's something else going on, about the preservation of "spiritual truths" (or is it religious prerogatives) throughout the bloodshed of history, as a crafty priest manages to save his monastery from Khan's pillaging. Surely if he'd really believed in spiritual values, he'd have simply told Khan he was a rampaging Beast.
It looks good, but so would anything in those locations and this much money thrown at it.
Perhaps, as its supposedly the first film in a trilogy, something will happen later on in the series to turn the gung-ho blather of this on its head. But the director does nothing here to encourage us to think about all those other individuals who aren't the Great Leader who die in their many thousands, and surely if he was a true human visionary artist, he would care about that kind of thing?
There's something else going on, about the preservation of "spiritual truths" (or is it religious prerogatives) throughout the bloodshed of history, as a crafty priest manages to save his monastery from Khan's pillaging. Surely if he'd really believed in spiritual values, he'd have simply told Khan he was a rampaging Beast.
It looks good, but so would anything in those locations and this much money thrown at it.
Perhaps, as its supposedly the first film in a trilogy, something will happen later on in the series to turn the gung-ho blather of this on its head. But the director does nothing here to encourage us to think about all those other individuals who aren't the Great Leader who die in their many thousands, and surely if he was a true human visionary artist, he would care about that kind of thing?