| Testimonials:"Bodrov and Arif Aliyev wrote the film, which was one of this year's foreign-language Oscar nominees, and their account is framed as a drama of inflamed loins and intense loyalty."Wesley Morris, Boston Globe"Sergei Bodrov brings back the cinematic epic of old with his revisionist view of Genghis Khan...There is no John Wayne or CGI to be seen in this Foreign Language Film Oscar nominee."Laura Clifford, Reeling Reviews"Adventure story, love story, history lesson: What's not to like?"Lewis Beale, Film Journal International | | Synopsis:Mongol – or, as I prefer to think of it, Genghis Khan: The Early Years – is a big, ponderous epic, its beautifully composed landscape shots punctuated by thundering hooves and bloody, slow-motion battle sequences.
Directed by the protean and prolific Russian filmmaker Sergei Bodrov it is, among other things, a stubborn defense of old-fashioned, grand-scale moviemaking. (It is also an old-style international co-production financed by some fairly new players in world cinema, including companies in Kazakhstan and Mongolia.) Without irony or digital effects, Mongol, the first installment in a planned trilogy, tells the story of a solitary man’s rise to a position of great power.
Mr. Bodrov follows his hero, a young warrior named Temudgin (played by the Japanese actor Tadanobu Asano), from boyhood to the eve of world conquest in 1206, when he would become the Genghis Khan known and feared by millions. There are some gaps in the narrative, but the portrait that emerges is of a reformer and a unifier, a leader who consolidates rival tribes and factions and who modernizes some of the traditional Mongol ways.
At his side in these efforts are a few allies and, above all, his wife, Börte (Khulan Chuluun), to whom he is betrothed as a child and to whom he remains loyal in spite of many setbacks and temptations. When she is kidnapped by marauding Merkits, Temudgin musters a small army to bring her back, a mission that astonishes his friend Jamukha (Honglei Sun). 'What Mongol ever went to war for a woman?' he wonders.
Jamukha, Temudgin's blood brother and semicomic sidekick, eventually becomes his enemy for reasons that are somewhat obscured in the fog of Mongol custom and legend. But the two of them are nicely matched foils, with Jamukha's levity and braggadocio dispelling some of the sober gloom that gathers around his friend.
Mongol moves solemnly across the decades, accumulating rich ethnographic detail and enough dramatic intrigue to sustain a viewer's interest through the slower stretches. While it takes a sympathetic view of young Genghis Khan – whose name, in the West, is a synonym for rapacity – it does not force him into conformity with modern sensibilities. His world feels authentically raw and refreshingly archaic, and also strangely beautiful.
– A.O. Scott, The New York Times
Trailer | | Official Website |
|  |  | |  | | MongolGreatness comes to those who take it. 
Country: | Germany, Kazakhstan, Russia | | Language: | Mongolian with English subtitles | | Cast: | Tadanobu Asano, Honglei Sun, Khulan Chuluun, Odnyam Odsuren | | Directed by: | Sergei Bodrov | | OFRB Rating: | 14A; Violence | | Runtime: | 120 minutes | | Show Dates: |
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