Review movies: Cinema | Film | Mongol | Directed by Sergei Bodrov | THE name Genghis Khan conjures up an image of a warlord who wielded a bloodied sabre over conquered lands.

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The Review - AT THE MOVIES with DAN CARRIER
Published: 5 June 2008

Mongol - big on cinematography

Camden cinema | Mongol movie review| Genghis Khan | Mongolia | Warlord | Gobi Desert

MONGOL
Directed by Sergei Bodrov
Certificate 15

THE name Genghis Khan conjures up an image of a warlord who wielded a bloodied sabre over conquered lands.
But his unsavoury reputation is trampled in this bio-pic of the Mongolian leader by Russian director Sergei Bodrov.
Bodrov has created a film which tells the story of Genghis Khan’s rise to power and the motivation behind his actions which alternates from being beautiful to shocking.
Temudgin is the name of the young Khan and we meet him, aged five, as he travels with his father across the Gobi Desert on their way to choose a bride from a rival clan. The marriage does not happen and it is a snub which is to have deadly, life-long consequences.
But rather than paint this period as a time of unenlightened barbarity, the image of a uncivilised Asian society falls away as the film rolls and the politics of this nomadic world are explained.
After watching the murder of his father and his own life is threatened by clansmen jostling for his father’s title, Temudgin has to make stark choices about survival and revenge.
It is a brutal imagining of a brutal age, violent without being gratuitous.
Mongol has all the ingredients of a top-drawer Western. Temudgin’s lonely, horse-riding figure could easily be the outlaw Josey Wales.
There is a refreshing lack of CGI. Battle scenes are played out with hundreds of horse-riding extras – it makes the Lord Of The Rings look like a cheap computer game.
Awesome cinematography meets incredible locations.
The soundtrack envelopes the viewer: moments of eerie silences are punctuated by the wind in the manes of the horses, the creak of saddles, the drunken chanting of the tribesmen.
The attention to detail is such that when the parts are added together, the whole is enthralling.
From a topic that sounds heavy – the adolescent development of Genghis Khan – the director has wrung an enthralling tale.

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