Customer Reviews

Warriors

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

With a lower budget, no big name actors and only an hour, these small movies are better than the last ten blockbusters I've seen. Not so much documentaries as dramatic depictions of the decision making and consequences of these leaders giving a believable version of what made them "tick." The acting, writing and direction are startlingly good with only the least intrusive narration. Think low-budbet David Lean. I deducted one star only because they should have been given more time and resourses. I only hope a second series is given exactly that.

Thrill to lavish, all-action dramatic spectacles based on the lives of six men who left their marks on the world-from Spartacus, the gladiator who brought Rome to its knees, to the audacious military genius, Napoleon. Absorbing drama and CGI effects reveal the motives, force of will, genius, courage and greed that drove these men to achieve what no one else had dared.

The first two disks include 6 one-hour docudramas, spectacularly produced, about Spartacus, Attila the Hun, The Shogun, Richard the Lionheart, Cortes, and Napolean. Disk 3, as bonus features, include a 90-minute docudrama about Hannibal starring Alexander Siddig (available at last in the US), a one-hour doc about Hannibal, and a one-hour docudrama about Genghis Khan. Production values are very high. This set is a great value for the history-lover.

Quite frankly, if it weren't for the sheer number of movies included in this pack, it would be a great disappointment.


"Hannibal: Rome's Worst Nightmare" starring Alexander Siddig is without a doubt the best film included in this bunch, and it's not even "officially" included, but a bonus film. It is perhaps the single most historically accurate TV/movie portrayal of ancient Rome I've ever seen, bested only by HBO's Rome in terms of aesthetics, and at 89 minutes, aside from a pointless one-off scene involving Imilce, Hannibal Barca's wife, in Hispania before they begin the campaign, is intensely crisp and fast-paced, while giving most events proper brevity and impact, complete with fitting music for dramatic effect and cut-aways giving information as to important historical figures, such as Hanno the Great, Quintus Fabius Maximus, Publius Scipio and his son, the future Scipio Africanus, Gaius Terentius Varro, Hasdrubal, Mago, Maharbal, etcetera.



Similarly, the film on the Shogun, following Tokugawa Ieyasu, is excellent, taut, and perfectly paced. My only complaint is that it was done in English. Despite the fact that pretty much all the others (except the one on Genghis Khan) are in English, I felt that this film could have benefitted far more from being in Japanese than not, though some of the lines spoken by the actor portraying Tokugawa Ieyasu, despite being in flawless English, sound as though they were truly Japanese.


The film on Genghis Khan is another rushed affair, which is done in Mongolian (or else some other Asian language) but is much less of a narrative like the others and more like a documentary, with the primary story being told by the narrator rather than the characters. It's more accurate than the totally unrelated movie "Mongol", but not nearly as enjoyable.



The other ones are very disappointing, varying in quality, but none coming close to the level of excellence of the aforementioned three. The film on Spartacus is horribly done, incredibly sparse on historical detail and accuracy, and pretty much just a vacant, pale re-creation of every other Spartacus production already done, with a far lower budget.

The Napoleon Bonaparte film was extraordinary in its concept of only portraying Napoleon's initial rise to significance in the military (and also, I feel, could have benefitted from being in French rather than English) but was too muddied, unclear, and scattershot. We see and hear a lot of odd things reflective of the Great Terror and the political mood and climate of early Republican France, but very little expansion of this as to HOW it affects the events in the story or WHY, and ultimately suffering the same problem as in the French-Canadian 2002 miniseries "Napoleon"---it doesn't show us anything special about Napoleon Bonaparte, but portrays him as ambitious, but average.


The Cortez film had such great potential, but (again, should have been in Spanish rather than English) was in my opinion overly rushed, and some questionable decisions made with the shooting (such as when Moctezuma and Cortez first meet, Moctezuma initially speaks his native language, but then BOTH start speaking English, while acting as if they cannot understand each other, using a native woman as interpreter. The rest of it suffers from lack of details, and total lack of understanding as to context---why stuff is happening in what context is unknown, and situations treated with gravity are completely lost on the viewer because there is no context given as to WHY it has gravity.



The film on Attila was an utter catastrophe in my opinion. We don't know anything about the Huns ethnically, and the only description would make them of apparent Asian descent. Speculation places them to be Turkic, Indo-European, or Steppe nomads from modern-day east Russia. Here, they are thickly, deeply Celtic, with Attila portrayed by Crateros! As in, Rory McCann, the guy who played Crateros in the 2004 movie "Alexander", and Marcus Agrippa as Edeco! As in, Allen Leech, the guy who played Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa in the second season of HBO's Rome.

While their portrayals were competent, Attila comes across not as a cunning genius or butcher here, but more a drunken oaf with an utterly arbitrary streak of cruelty that comes around the middle of the film. He is thoroughly unremarkable. He seems like a generic Hollywood-style leader who, after the fact, the writers remembered is supposed to be a feared figure, and so superficially added instances or dialogue showing him as brutal and vicious. He's less like Attila and more like a greedy Robin Hood.


Making the film even more disastrous, aside from Attila coming across so dim and incompetent, is the story, or lack of one. Almost nothing really happens beyond ideas that are executed and only sparsely tied together.


The filmmakers also seem to have completely forgotten that the Huns are essentially cavalry soldiers. They're said to be on horseback all the time, urinate on horseback, eat on horseback, fight on horseback and so on.

The Huns are NEVER on horseback in this ENTIRE film except for the opening sequence involving a diplomatic meeting.


The film on Richard I was unremarkable as well.

I was very impressed by this series. My only regret is that there can't be any more of these excellent episodes. People like Julius Ceaser or Shaka Zulu could be on this series.

like to show freinds this becase they dont know half of these pepole on here and if they do they just know there names.

This was a great way to learn of these warriors, very well written, good acting and pretty decent graphics. I highly recommend for anyone who wants to learn of these historical warriors.