Rather weird double bill I had tonight, I got tickets to see Cat Power (which I'll do in my next entry) at the Academy (one of the select few establishments I have ever condescended with my services ) and seeing as I wanted to pick up the tickets from the box office before 5pm, I decided to catch Mongol inbetween getting the tickets and seeing the gig.

So, the film. Well ... it's alright. It does drag a bit, the drama is simplistically told and the battle scenes are fairly low-rent with some laughably bad cgi-splashes of blood. That said though, I don't think it's a bad watch, the subject matter is interesting (I just spent a good 10 minutes wikipediaing the topic) and it's certainly a cinematic experience.

Part of the problem though was my personal cinematic experience - there were two people with special needs who were at the front accompanied by carers and one was howling and moaning throughout most of the movie. At the hour point it was at its height and a girl in front of me left to complain. A guy overlooked from the side but they had piped down a bit by then. To be fair, with the amount of wailing and groaning on the soundtrack it wasn't always immediately apparant they were doing it. I'm glad they didn't get kicked out, as I left I saw the one woman hugging her charge so I hope they enjoyed it because they certainly tested the patience of the rest of the audience.

So because of this I had a little bit of trouble fully immersing myself in the film. I'm not sure the storytelling would have done that even if I was the only person in the cinema though. The score and sound I'm not really sold on, at times it was very stirring and evocative, at others it was just intrusive and there for the sake of it.

The narrative isn't exactly strong, but then it is a true story, but then also they're taking the odd liberty here and there. It's not really an action film because the battle scenes aren't that good, it's not a normal biopic because you don't really get to the heart of the man and it's not a historical document because of the mysticism involved. So it doesn't really know what it wants to be and in the end it's almost like a three ring circus - if you don't like the battles there's the love story, if you don't like the love story there's the historical intrigue, it's all very well and good but not very focused.

So deserving of its Oscar nomination for foreign language film? Absolutely not. Worth checking out? Maybe, I'd be slightly reluctant to recommend it as I can't really see who would thoroughly enjoy it, but on the other hand it does aim for multiple audiences so a lot of people may get something out of it. I didn't get much, but it was a decent way to kill time pre-Chan.