Mongol

Mongol provides a historical supposition about the life of Genghis Khan in his rise to power from a nine-year old boy namedTemudjin to a thirty-something uniting the Mongol people under his military rule.

Director Bodrov clearly wants to paint a different picture of young Temudjin than most people have from from reading about the savage Gengis Kahn. Mongol paints a picture of a stubborn, religious man devoted to his wife and determined to create a great empire for the benefit of all Mongol people -- 'even if half of them have to die for it.' We never see much of the cruelty or torture often associated in history toGengis Khan. Clearly he has enormous chrisma, or he couldn't have assembled such a huge army. We get a slight glimpse at why men choose to follow Temudjin, but we never see how he amasses an army with thousands of warriors. Also, we get the implication that Temudjin has brilliant battle strategy, but again we don't see much concrete demonstration of these skills.

We do see a lot of bloodshed, but only on the scale appropriate for cavalry or hand-to-hand combat. The Mongols use long swords and spears, so you see a lot of blood flowing from lengthy abdominal and leg wounds. And even though the Mongols don't kill women or children, they clearly don't spare the horses. I did like thatBodrov used a huge cast of extras to film his armies rather than the current technique of using CGI effects to copy and paste platoon after platoon of combatants across the battle field. Maybe I couldn't have seen the difference, but just knowing that every man in those huge armies was a real person and not a computer-generated image made the final battle scene much more effective.