Braveheart
Dec. 14th, 2012 03:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficI have finished watching Braveheart. It is a terrible movie. Terrible. (Though I suddenly see why Gibson made The Passion of the Christ--somebody has a torture porn kink.)
Watching it, I kept comparing it to Gladiator a movie which, let's face it, has pretty much the exact same plot. And also won best picture. Slap a kilt on it, and it's Braveheart.
I have my issues with Gladiator--I've always found it to be a movie of which I love the individual pieces, but hate the whole. I find it compelling and off-putting at the same time. But the main difference, as I see it, is that I actually give a crap about Maximus, and the other slaves (as I said in an earlier comment). You get to see Maximus become a leader--you see his charisma, you see why people follow him. That movie starts with his followers as disparate people who make a choice to be part of a group because it's better than trying to survive on their own. And the combat sequences show tactics. I hate them and love them at the same time--they're too gory for me, but I saw a version on TV once where they'd edited out the gore and it made the battles incomprehensible, so I'd have to say it was necessary.
All of that is missing from Braveheart. Wallace's woman (spoiler!) gets fridged, and he automatically has Followers. You never see why people have chosen to follow this guy's revenge quest. Later on, once he's started winning, more people arrive, but none of them are fleshed out (I don't really count the Irish guy as fleshed out, since his entire characterization is I'm Irish!). So I just didn't give a crap about anybody, and therefore didn't care about the boring talking scenes or the battle scenes.
Compare this to Gladiator where I cared about the side characters so much that I felt very ill-used by the movie when they were almost all offed.
So in conclusion, Braveheart is balls. It's so balls that I think King Arthur is a better movie, and King Arthur is TERRIBLE--but at least had one character I liked in it. Now that I've seen Braveheart, I'm just going to count it as seeing The Patriot and The Passion of the Christ and all of Mel Gibson's other epics as well.
(It's also weird cause I've owned the soundtrack since high school, so I knew the music sufficiently to be able to predict the action by where I knew the music was going. Not that the action is hard to predict anyway.)
Watching it, I kept comparing it to Gladiator a movie which, let's face it, has pretty much the exact same plot. And also won best picture. Slap a kilt on it, and it's Braveheart.
I have my issues with Gladiator--I've always found it to be a movie of which I love the individual pieces, but hate the whole. I find it compelling and off-putting at the same time. But the main difference, as I see it, is that I actually give a crap about Maximus, and the other slaves (as I said in an earlier comment). You get to see Maximus become a leader--you see his charisma, you see why people follow him. That movie starts with his followers as disparate people who make a choice to be part of a group because it's better than trying to survive on their own. And the combat sequences show tactics. I hate them and love them at the same time--they're too gory for me, but I saw a version on TV once where they'd edited out the gore and it made the battles incomprehensible, so I'd have to say it was necessary.
All of that is missing from Braveheart. Wallace's woman (spoiler!) gets fridged, and he automatically has Followers. You never see why people have chosen to follow this guy's revenge quest. Later on, once he's started winning, more people arrive, but none of them are fleshed out (I don't really count the Irish guy as fleshed out, since his entire characterization is I'm Irish!). So I just didn't give a crap about anybody, and therefore didn't care about the boring talking scenes or the battle scenes.
Compare this to Gladiator where I cared about the side characters so much that I felt very ill-used by the movie when they were almost all offed.
So in conclusion, Braveheart is balls. It's so balls that I think King Arthur is a better movie, and King Arthur is TERRIBLE--but at least had one character I liked in it. Now that I've seen Braveheart, I'm just going to count it as seeing The Patriot and The Passion of the Christ and all of Mel Gibson's other epics as well.
(It's also weird cause I've owned the soundtrack since high school, so I knew the music sufficiently to be able to predict the action by where I knew the music was going. Not that the action is hard to predict anyway.)
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Date: 2012-12-14 10:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-12-16 08:45 pm (UTC)