- I don’t know very much about Genghis Khan, but I have a feeling that this is a very cheery and positive take on his life. They go overboard portraying him as this kind doting father (who even adopts as his own the child his wife is carrying by another man), but I’ve always been under the impression that he was big on the raping and pillaging, what with his 16 million descendants living today (or whatever the stat is). I suppose being a rapist and pillager doesn’t negate the possibility of being a doting father to children borne by your favourite wife, but…. yeah, I’m not convinced.
- I just love the word “yurt”.
- I feel like half the movie was spent with Temujin (Genghis Khan) running away from his father’s enemies on horseback, decade after decade. And I loved how the one guy wouldn’t kill him before he became an adult because it’s a Mongol rule not to kill kids, only their definition of adult was apparently not by age but by height. YOU MUST BE THIS TALL TO BE KILLED BY THE NEW KHAN. What is this, an amusement park ride? Once he had child!Temujin in captivity, the main enemy kept getting this old guy to feed Temujin so that he’d grow more quickly and thus reach the height requirement faster.
- Very violent in places, with really strange blood spatters. That said, the style of violence was slightly different from what you see in American movies, so that was a nice change of pace. It had something to do with how the swords looked while impaling people, I don’t know.
- Also, there’s some pretty intense blunt force head trauma when Temujin bludgeons a guy to death with one of those big wooden things they stick around your neck when you’re held captive, so that was pretty disgusting.
- I feel like this is Braveheart filtered through Mongolia.
Mongol
Something tells me this is the sanitized version of this story.
IMDB Plot Synopsis The story recounts the early life of Genghis Khan who was a slave before going on to conquer half the world including Russia in 1206.