I've seen three other films by Vladimir Bortko -- adaptations on "Heart of a Dog" and "The Master and Margarita" by Bulgakov and "The Idiot" by Dostoevsky. These were works that were close to my heart, and I thought Borko did a fantastic and mindful job of recreating them for the screen.
Here he seems to have been given a much bigger budget, possibly a set of orders from the Russian government, and the short novel "Taras Bulba" by Gogol -- a piece of literature that didn't resonate with me nearly as much as the three aforementioned ones. While I loved some of Gogol's other stories, "Taras Bulba" struck me as mostly overblown, thoughtless nationalism, which didn't sit well with me.
I didn't much care for this film either, so to be perfectly fair that could be because Bortko faithfully reproduced a book that I didn't love in the first place. Everything revolves around the inclusion of battle scenes and dead-serious scenes about going to battle, and it is assumed without saying that of course we will be rooting for the Cossack's over the Poles.
Maybe we will be and maybe we won't, but using that as an assumption to make the film work means it's rooted in pure nationalism and nothing more. If that's alright with you, then fine, but it's not a substantive ideology. Even if we take it as given, there are few too many scenes of dying people who use their last breath to give a heartfelt speech about how the Cossack soul will never be vanquished.
There are plenty of enormous pitched battle scenes with many very bloody wounds shown. The visual work on this is impressive, but it seems empty without a fuller context. The events of the plot seem entirely constructed to allow for more speeches about Cossack national spirit to be worked in, and as such are spread pretty thin. The result is that odd duck -- an action packed movie that is actually rather slow-moving.
The up side is that there are some very good performances, especially from Bogdan Stupka and Igor Petrenko. They understand the material give performances that are as warlike and humorless as possible.
I'm not an expert in the era of history on which Gogol based the source novel for this film, so I can't really address what has been brought up many times here -- the potential incongruity of the Cossacks mentioning Russia in their speeches and speaking Russian (as opposed to other characters, who speak Ukrainian with voice overs). But I think there is more nationalism than just Gogol's at work here, on the whole.
A lot of technical skill and passionate acting went into this. Unfortunately, it's a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing but blind patriotism. That might make it a good watch for if you're about to go and kill some Polish people with your trusty sword today and need inspiration, but it doesn't make it a good film.
Here he seems to have been given a much bigger budget, possibly a set of orders from the Russian government, and the short novel "Taras Bulba" by Gogol -- a piece of literature that didn't resonate with me nearly as much as the three aforementioned ones. While I loved some of Gogol's other stories, "Taras Bulba" struck me as mostly overblown, thoughtless nationalism, which didn't sit well with me.
I didn't much care for this film either, so to be perfectly fair that could be because Bortko faithfully reproduced a book that I didn't love in the first place. Everything revolves around the inclusion of battle scenes and dead-serious scenes about going to battle, and it is assumed without saying that of course we will be rooting for the Cossack's over the Poles.
Maybe we will be and maybe we won't, but using that as an assumption to make the film work means it's rooted in pure nationalism and nothing more. If that's alright with you, then fine, but it's not a substantive ideology. Even if we take it as given, there are few too many scenes of dying people who use their last breath to give a heartfelt speech about how the Cossack soul will never be vanquished.
There are plenty of enormous pitched battle scenes with many very bloody wounds shown. The visual work on this is impressive, but it seems empty without a fuller context. The events of the plot seem entirely constructed to allow for more speeches about Cossack national spirit to be worked in, and as such are spread pretty thin. The result is that odd duck -- an action packed movie that is actually rather slow-moving.
The up side is that there are some very good performances, especially from Bogdan Stupka and Igor Petrenko. They understand the material give performances that are as warlike and humorless as possible.
I'm not an expert in the era of history on which Gogol based the source novel for this film, so I can't really address what has been brought up many times here -- the potential incongruity of the Cossacks mentioning Russia in their speeches and speaking Russian (as opposed to other characters, who speak Ukrainian with voice overs). But I think there is more nationalism than just Gogol's at work here, on the whole.
A lot of technical skill and passionate acting went into this. Unfortunately, it's a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing but blind patriotism. That might make it a good watch for if you're about to go and kill some Polish people with your trusty sword today and need inspiration, but it doesn't make it a good film.