The Greek Independence War against the Ottoman Turkish Empire, is an AMAZING & IMPORTANT historical event that VERY FEW films hove covered - one or two Hollywood films and a couple dozen "Kitsch" Greek movies...
This is quite good production, quite well made. I won't spoil or write anything about the film. Its about a very important battle and its the second film of the same director/producer.
Lets see the Pros & Cons of this film.
PROS
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- Very good outfirst, weapons, "uniforms", banners/flags, very historical accurate - which is amazing, because other VERY MUCH MORE expensive productions had very bad costumes.
- Very good photography, great lighting, realistic shadows and illuminated sources, accurate to the historic era.
- The turkish dialogues are very good. I have origin from Istanbul and I know some turkish; these are well put, in the film.
- The landscape and the environment are great, natural (real Greek places), very realistic to that historical era.
- The story starts in WW2, just before the Nazi invasion to Greece (1941). That section is very very good, nicely portraited and the actors of those scenes.
- All the elder actors played very well.
- The "Arvanites" group were AMAZING portraited!
CONS
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- The battle. This battle was a notorious one; took place in a monastery between 2000+ Greeks against 4000+ Turks. In the film, we have... 12 (tops!) Greeks (male & female) fighting the 4000+ Turkish army!!! Obviously the production didn't have money to hire a lot standmen, but they should figure out to solve this. In the entire battle, we see a LARGE WIDE monastery area covered by 10 men (many yards of uncovered small stone-fence wall and NO TURK trying to jump over it!), waves of Turks attacking the small wall and few Greeks defending for a couple days! Even my very young kid was surprised and asked me "Hey dad, how come so few people defeated so many Turks?"....
- The weapons firing. They were early-stage musket riffles, those "kariofili" the Greeks had. They were very bad weapons, many times they were jammed, lot of times they were EXPLODED on the fighters' faces and of course these weapons needed A LOT TIME to reload. In the film, we see the Greeks firing and firing and keep firing, like they had automatic modern weapons. I know, the production SUPPOSED TO PORTRAITED the real battle (which were 2000+ Greeks), but the VISUAL RESULT of the film is silly.
- The screenplay and acting were bellow average. The elder actors (those they are 50+ years old) played well, the younger actors failed a lot to act as they should in a such historic dramatic film.
- The actors, although they were wearing great historical accurate outfits, theire HAIRCUTS were VERY MODERN - like they were modern/present folks and they "jumped" there via a "time machine". Also, their DIALOGUES were VERY modern Greek, not that older Greek speaking.
- The plot was SLOWER than a... turtle! Seriously, I found myself lot times to press the "FF" button to skip a lot boring scenes.
- It was very obvious the production had few money to spend, it was a cheap production - you could see it all over the film.
Generally, it was a good effort, with average result.
I believe the production picked a WRONG event to present. This battle in that monastery was a LARGE SCALE battle between 2000+ Greek rioting guerilla troops against 4000+ regular Turkish army. So, since the production had few money to spend, they shouldn't pick that event to show. They are SO MANY events (large, small) in those 8 years the Greek Independence War took place, that they should pick OTHER event to show. For example, the "ZALOGGOS DEATH DANCE" of those brave Souliotisses women, that they refused to surrender to the Turks and they fell from a high cliff WITH THEIR CHILDREN and they died. Or, the last stand of the elder Souliotis KAPSALIS, who decided to fire up the arsenal in the basement of a church and blow up himself, the women & children there and thousand Turks around the church!!! ...So many other, more, events, small scale, to portrait better than THIS VERY LARGE SCALE battle.
Lets see their last 3rd movie, who it will be.
