Product Details

• Actors: John Lone, Joan Chen, Peter O´Toole
• Directors: Bernardo Bertolucci
• Format: NTSC, Import, Dolby, Subtitled, Widescreen
• Subtitles: Spanish
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B000UTH0PE
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #385,186 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Pekín, 1908. China se encuentra en plena decadencia. Pu Yi, un niño de tres años, es arrancado de los brazos de su madre, en medio de la noche, y conducido hasta la Ciudad Prohibida, donde es coronado emperador, pero tendrá que vivir recluido dentro de este recinto inaccesible..

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Peace at the end of a tragic life, June 3, 2011

By 

Safa Alai (St. Louis, MO USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Last Emperor (Amazon Instant Video)

The beauty of this movie shines in its last scene, when the last emperor, now an old man reduced to a humble sweeper at the Forbidden City, passes on the treasure of his childhood to a young boy. And what is that treasure? A tiny cricket trapped in a jar hidden in the emperor's throne. And therein lies the symbolism of the movie: the old man representing old China, the boy representing the promise of new China just before its economic rise, and the exchange showing us that at our core simple humanity transcends sweeping forces that roil the world.

The rest is the tragedy of a life caught between vast changes transforming China and the World. The last emperor, Pu Yi, gains the throne at the age of three, and from that moment on he is slave to the designs of external forces, each and everyone beyond his control or comprehension. He is virtually a prisoner of the Forbidden City, and without any instruction as to the conditions of the world beyond, he busies himself with what pleasures are afforded him in the palace, culminating in finding female beauty and companionship in his wife and concubine. He only leaves the palace when war breaks out and the Japanese, planning to use him as a puppet to legitimize their occupation of China, promise him power and empire. From that moment on, one by one he loses everything: his status, his concubine, his wife, his riches, and finally his freedom when he ends up in a labor camp.

Yet we wonder when he had ever been free. Perhaps the labor camp, where he is treated like any other peasant of no special significance, is the first place that he truly finds freedom, a notion accentuated in the last scene when he once again sees the world through the eyes of a little boy who reminds him of a childhood, lost long ago, when he could truly be himself.

The rest of the movie is sweeping drama and cinematography. I know it has been much talked about and praised, and truly it is gorgeous filming, yet at times I feel that it is a little over dramatic, as if the director aspires to recreate a bit of shakespeare in the midst of China, and like a chalk screeching on the blackboard, some scenes just feel way over the top. Yet the videography inside the Forbidden City, the grand scenes of the old Chinese Army, and the attention to period costumes and details, transport you back to the last days of China before modernization, giving you an inkling of what it must have been like to live in the lap of majestic old China.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent movie, December 21, 2011

By 

SN - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Last Emperor (Amazon Instant Video)

This movie is very well made. I am not sure if it is truely based on history but I know that it is not a complete fiction. I highly recommend watching it. I watched it when I was a kid when it was first came out and I enjoyed it. The 2nd time I still enjoy it.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Last Emperor as seen through the eyes of Bernardo Bertolucci, November 26, 2011

By 

Harald Jan "Haroldsworld" (Norway) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Last Emperor [Region 2] (DVD)

The film "The Last Emperor", as seen through the eyes of the talented Italian film maker Bernardo Bertolucci, is not an accurate presentation of Pu Yi the last Emperor, and was never meant to be. Bertolucci's film has all the temperament and grandness of an Italian made Opera performed at La Scala. It is HIS film, just as much as the films made by another famous Italian film director Federico Fellini are HIS way of telling a story through his own eyes. In September 2003 I came to Shenyang, the industrial hub in North East China, in earlier times called Mukden, in Manchuria. I had come specifically to visit the Imperial Palace, the residence of the real last Emperor Pu Yi. But, being the flamboyant Italian Latino Bertolucci was, he decided to move the whole film set to Beijing where the Imperial Palace and the Forbidden City, its roofs and gardens where even more grandiose than the Imperial Palace in Shenyang (Mukden). For me it was a great pleasure to be there and walk through the yards and buildings with its Imperial yellow colored stone roofs. I 1977 I made a research tour to Rome's famous film making place "Cinecitta". It lays some kilometers outside the Capital. There, for the first time I could see with my own eyes the film set of Federico Fellini's epic film "Rome" and "Satyricon", the latter being made some years before; some of the film set still standing there to be admired. The film by Bertolucci is a master's piece of work, a director with exceptionally high quality standards with regards to visualization and drama. People interested in the history of Manchuria and the Second Japanese-Chinese war as well as Pu Yi must see this film. I also recommend reading the book about the last Emperor, which one can find here on Amazon.