Nice shots.

I saw this movie and hated it enough to give it a rating of 1/10 on IMDb. It's also extremely historically inaccurate (I would even say dishonest).

I'm sure most people wouldn't hate it as much as I did. My problems with it were mostly on an ideological level - I can't stand self-important movies that claim to be based on true events, even when they do a decent job of researching their subject and more or less accurately representing it. So when they make no effort and just lie or make shit up because they're either too lazy to get it right or the facts just don't fit into their neatly packaged little story, I get really angry.

I did quite a bit of research on the film (I actually had to, for job-related reasons) and the list of factual errors (...well, "errors" is not the best word for it - "lies" would be more appropriate...) just goes on and on and on. There is almost nothing in the film that is true, starting with the school, which wasn't an orphanage at all, but a reform school for disobedient kids. That's just one example in a long list.

Another thing that bothered me was that it pretends to be a film about Chinese historical events, but it's really about a couple of white Western characters showing everyone how noble and heroic they are. (Two characters who basically never existed, because they are so far from the actual historical people they are supposedly based on.)

Even if you're not familiar with the history and don't care about ideology, I just don't think it's a very good film. The acting was mediocre and so was everything else. If it weren't for the larger historical/ideological issues, I probably would have given the film a rating of 4 or 5 out of 10 - slightly below average. But the combination of mediocre craft and dishonest intentions justifies the 1 out of 10 in my opinion.

Zabladowski wrote on 02. Feb 2009 at 04:16:


Barely. All these crappy films I saw at the Montreal WFF over the years are a blur. (But there are a few good ones that stand out.)