Indeed it looks... "pretty"... similar to a lot of Russian movies and from some other countries, but I am still waiting for a really "good" one from those countries.
Usually they lack the "maturity" you can find sometimes in western (though usually not Hollywood) movies.
The historic movies of all those countries that try to establish some film industry always have a few points in common:
- glorification of the own history
- one dimensional characters. Usually evil invaders, good defenders. Main character has some kind of "alibi character flaw" like being afraid of water or something like that, which doesn't really make him deep
)
- battles are usually too big (hundreds of thousands of animated soldiers)
- battle skills are usually way too high for the main characters (having them dancing over the battlefield and killing shitloads of enemies while passing by)
- high gore factor with hundreds of gallons of blood, without being really realistic
- although usually being close to history you can always find mistakes that weren't really neccessary. You don't have to put every soldier in a uniform to show the audiance which side he belongs to. Using different equipment but with a common colour would be the perfect compromise
I see many of those points in the trailer above. Don't get me wrong, I will watch this movie for certain, I just want to say that I am waiting for a movie that is NOT this way. But actually I know only few movies that meet my criterias above. One was, as I said, "Alatriste", another one is "The name of the Rose". "Flesh and Blood" is something in between, as some of the points above apply on the movie, but some don't.
"Kingdom of Heaven" has a lot of aspects of the list above (especially concerning the one dimensional characters), but on the other hand it lacks the damn glorification and pathos ("Killing a muslim is no murder - it's the way to heaven!", the Knight Templars attacking that caravan, the Bishop suggesting to convert to Islam and renounce it later), and the main characters are no real superhumans while fighting. So I would say it's a good movie, but without Balian and everything around him it could have been a great one.
But movies like "Robin Hood" or "Braveheart" are fitting perfectly to the list above.
I hope you guys understand what I mean.
