Zack put a foreign movie called "Mongol" on our netflix list.  It's the story of the early life of Genghis Khan.  Naturally there's some bloodshed and battle scenes.  Zack really liked it.  He told me it was well made, a good story and beautifully shot.  He recommended it to me this way "It's like 300, but not so cartoony."

I loved 300, not the least because of the cartoony-ness, which I prefer to think of as operatic.  Zack knows I have no problem with bloodshed in battle scenes, although I have no taste for it as entertainment.  I love war movies, hate slasher movies.  That's one reason why I'm the only person I know who hated Gladiator.  That movie pretended to scold the Romans for their love of blood sports while in reality it encouraged the audience to enjoy the same.  Oooh!  Look!  Thanks to CGI we can actually see the tigers rip the faces off those slaves!  Isn't ancient Rome awful?  I also thought that movie was dull and the characters stupid, but that has nothing to do with Mongol, which wasn't dull and the characters weren't stupid.

Zack was right, I liked it a lot.  It reminded me of Dances with Wolves and not just because the Mongolian steppes look a lot like North Dakota.  All I knew about Genghis Khan was what I'd read of Louis L'Amour, who wrote more than once that Europeans were darn lucky that no one like Genghis Khan ever rose out of the Native American tribes, or the West may have been won by a completely different team.

Mongol is meant to be the first of a trilogy about G.Khan, so this movie really only deals with his early life.  It's very good and I liked it but it skipped over some of the stuff that I would've considered the most interesting, like how did he unite the disparate Mongolian tribes?  This movie could've taken a page out of Braveheart's book and shown us the leadership involved in that endeavor, but instead, it just skips ahead a few years and says he became the great Khan of all Mongols and one of the greatest leaders the world had ever known....yeah, you'd think there'd be a movie in that, wouldn't you?  Maybe next time.

So, yes, I really liked it but it was no Braveheart.

 Zack loved Mongol for it's epic sweep, gorgeous photography and gripping characters.  I'll have to tell him there once was a Brit who united and lead the Arab tribes during WWI.  A gorgeous, sweeping epic movie was made about him, too.  His name was T.E.Lawrence.

Mongol was good, but it doesn't hold a candle to Lawrence of Arabia.