if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

All that we are seeing on the screen is happening with real people, real action sequences in the background, forcing the eye to watch as if we were there.

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

When people talk about " The greatest military strategist of all time " we often hear of the Eurocentric view with people such as Napoleon and Alexander The Great being mentioned . Genghis Khan sometimes gets brought up but perhaps it's because he's Asiatic and perceived as being a barbarian that he doesn't get name checked more often . The fact that his hordes started off on the Mongolian plains of East Asia and managed to get as far as Poland in an era when logistics and force projection were primitive to non existent was an almost superhuman feat . This film is about the early life of Khan What struck me about MONGOL is that it feels on a narrative level something similar to a Western . Young Khan sees a person close to him as a child murdered and he vows revenge . As the boy turns in to a man then a man has got to do what a man has got to do . There is a very strong element of Khan being a nomadic stranger and having to protect homesteaders from the bad guys but there's a slight difference that Khan's brutality and thirst of conquest goes way beyond the anti-heroism seen with Clint Eastwood starring in a movie directed by Sergio Leone It's a film directed by Russian Sergey Bodrov and occasionally I have the pleasure of discussing cinema with professional critics . One of them , an affable gentleman called David Wingrove . described the films of Michael Powell as " Pastoral Gothic " but that phrase could be accurately used more in discussing Russian cinema where the camera lovingly lingers on rural landscapes where humanity is a mere tiny spec of the bigger aspect of nature . One pivotal scene sees the young Khan arrive a temple and is watched by a wolf and while it then cuts to another scene therefore leaving Khan's predicament unexplained which sums up the film where the narrative is somewhat jarring but is compensated but its concentration of the metaphysical almost mystical beauty of nature

The subject of this movie is pretty awesome.Too bad the writer of this movie simply doesn't know how to tell a story. This problem is apparent right of the bat. After just a few minutes of introduction we suddenly see the message: "20 years earlier". I was like... 20 years earlier of what? Nothing happened yet! Later on we see the hero 9 years old when he just escaped captivity - alone and abandoned. We are dying to know what happens. And what does happen? The screen fades out and fades in... 20 years later. With no explanation of any kind. And he gets captured again.It doesn't seem like any effort was made to tell this story in an interesting and exciting way. It's just some separate slow moving scenes put together.

MONGOL is a biographic drama about the early life of TEMUDJIN (here played by the actor Tadanobu Asano), from his childhood to the point he becomes Genghis Khan, the great leader of all Mongols. This movie focuses essentially in the hard life he had as a child and before he becomes a Khan, and also the way he achieved this major status of the great leader, who united all the nomad Mongol tribes. The film ends at the point he's preparing to conquer other territories.This movie has a wonderful photography/cinematography. The beautiful shots of the Mongolian steppes are truly amazing and the way directing work is done is also great. Some camera angles, details, and combination of the images and sounds in some specific scenes are really outstanding. The soundtrack is also great by the way. Production and acting are very good too. After watch the movie I didn't get surprised by the Academy Oscar nomination as "Best Foreign Language Film of the Year" in 2008 at all!

The Historical Epic is a disappearing staple from Hollywood, but many of them are still made in other parts of the world where it is probably a good deal cheaper to do so--Mongol is a perfect example, a grand, sweeping biographical tale about the development of a leader--this time set in Mongolia in the 12th Century.The scenery in Mongol is incredibly varied and beautiful and the battle scenes, when they come, are stark and brutal, but the main focus here is the development of the main character from childhood to maturity.Tadanobu Asano captures the quiet tenacity of a young man whose loyalties are to a way of life he chooses to defend: he picks out a wife when he is 9 years old (she later claims she chose him), and remains faithful to his idea of family and home no matter what the exterior challenges--it's a humane film about a violent time, charged with mythic resonance and incredible scope.