Supelice Dreadfully Boring

Orla Zuniga It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

Marva-nova Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

Sarita Rafferty There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

Boris-Sh I watched the film in Russian, as I'm a Russian speaker. The film focuses less on the characters and the people, and mostly focuses on patriotic issues, such as showing how Napoleon and the French are cruel, showing how the Russians are brave and how they protect their motherland and "sacred Moscow". The story telling is very outdated. There are jumps within the story between scenes. Scenes with potential emotions and empathy are cut short, just when they get interesting, and sometimes the narrator just tells you what happened instead of showing it. You can count the emotional scenes on 1 hand. You just can't get any connection to the characters. The battle scenes are impressive, with many participants and extras, and are done in a very large scale. But they are too long and tiring. After you get impressed from the first minutes, you just get bored and wait for the lengthy scenes to finish. The too long and outdated effects and the lengthy many philosophical texts also do not contribute to the viewing experience. And add to everything the length of these film-series... I was very disappointed, after having high expectations due to the good reviews on IMDB. Recently I watched a much newer version made by BBC. It was much much better and interesting - it captured all the key moments and developments, but added a lot of emotion and empathy to them.

florinc After one finishes viewing it, and only afterward, one realizes that this movie cannot be made. This movie was there all the time, always. It only requested a camera, like some smoke lamp that visualizes an invisible laser beam. It is like carving away chunks of darkness to reveal the light inside. And after all the efforts to come to terms with the reality one realizes that this movie cannot be seen: too deep, too wide, too high, too vast, too beautiful, too painful. In the end, it strikes you with the most hard and harsh of them all questions that cannot be asked, but only answered: the deepest sense of joy of life comes from the simplest acknowledgment of the joy of being in life. This, and only this can explain why sheer opulence replaces the ascetic simple beauty in Andrei Rublev.

pninson I'm probably not giving this movie a fair shake, as I was unable to watch all of it. Perhaps if I'd seen it in a theater, in its original presentation, I might have appreciated it, but it's far too slow-moving for me.I read the book some 25 years ago and the details of the plot have faded from memory. This did not help the film, as it's something less than vivid and clear in its presentation of events.This is really four linked films, or a film in four parts, and was, I believe, intended to be seen over four nights in a theatrical presentation. I found Part I to be enjoyable enough, but it was all I could do to sit through Part II, which drags interminably. Reading Tolstoy's philosophizing is one thing. If you get a good translation or can read it in the original, his brilliant writing far outweighs any issues one might have with the pace of the story. On film, however, it's hard to reproduce without being ponderous.I have other issues with the parts of the film that I saw. It's very splashy, with a lot of hey-ma-look-at-this camera work that calls attention to itself, instead of serving to advance the story.Clearly, I'm missing something, but I just couldn't summon the enthusiasm to crank up parts III and IV.

aerovian This is not a commentary on the actual movie, but on the RUSCICO DVD release for North America. I don't know if there have been different releases and updates, but the disks we rented had a 2000 copyright on them, if that means anything. Anyway, the sound mixing on these DVD's was absolutely horrible. The levels often yo-yo-ed up and down; when the scene cut to a battlefield panorama, the orchestral track would thunder so loudly that I didn't know which would blow out first -- my eardrums or my speakers. When it was time for dialog, the volume would usually drop to something barely audible. Occasionally, the orchestra and Foley-work would stay loud while the dialog was superimposed at a much lesser level. My wife and I found that the only way we could watch this movie at all from these DVD's was if one of us kept a hand on the remote to continuously modulate the volume. And, like another user has already commented, when we selected English audio the dialog kept switching back and forth between Russian and English; and occasionally when the characters spoke in French on the native track the dubbing was in Russian, so you're SOL if you understand neither. Ultimately, we gave up watching after the first disk. Before you fork out $50+ for this movie on DVD for your own library, I'd heartily recommend getting your hands on a rental copy to see whether you can really enjoy this epic flick when burdened by such bad sound, particularly if you've never read the book and really want to understand the storyline.