The most pleasing part of this film, I thought, was the excellent cinematography. Kudos to Roger Stoffers and Sergei Trofimov for an outstanding job photographing this movie, making the most bleak of landscapes look stunning many times and adding some wonderful closeup shots of objects and faces.
It's not a bad story, either, although not one that will keep you riveted to the screen for the full two hours. However, I wasn't bored, either, although some of the action scenes looked too repetitive with very hokey-looking special-effects concerning blood splashing out of people in the battle scenes. It did not look real, but as if it were drawn. It's ironic in that the production values seem to be so high with a such a nicely-filmed effort, yet the action scenes are staged like a B-movie.
In a nutshell, this is the story of how "Genghis Kahn," who is "Temudjin" throughout the movie, spent his tough early life and how he became the famous warrior. We just see how many hardships the man endured to become who he was later in life. He was never referred to as Genghis Kahn which, I learned hear, is a title more than a name. That must have come later, after he had control of all the Mongol armies, which is where the film ends.
Many times, it's a not a pleasant existence for "Temudjin," who was marked man from the age of nine. We see him spend many lonely hours held captive in different places. The looks on his face are memorable. Odnyam Odsuren ad the young "Temudjin" and Tadanobu Asano as the adult "Temudjin" both had extraordinarily photographic faces.
One of the few problems I had with the movie were understanding "the rest of the story" as certain scenes ended abruptly leaving me (and I assume other viewers) wondering "what happened?" His friends, though, were fun to watch and his bride was a beautiful, kind and strong woman, as pictured in this movie. Actually, I found this just as much of a love story as a war epic, and the romance angle was far more dramatic. The devotion the lead male and female had to each other, and the faithfulness and loyalty were inspiring, to say the least.
