BroadcastChic Excellent, a Must See

Supelice Dreadfully Boring

Konterr Brilliant and touching

Philippa All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

chengiz War and Peace the novel is so long its length has entered popular culture. So a four part, seven plus hour movie adaptation of it makes sense. But not if you're gonna devote a quarter of it to just one battle. I don't know if the Communist party was responsible for the third part, but it just drags. Yes, it's very real, and I love realism in a movie, but realism is not *sufficient*. The battle sounds superb on paper, certainly *looks* like the costliest battle ever shot, but it's a poorly directed, boring, overlong, confusing mess. The first two parts of this movie were very good: the balls, the duel, some of the soliloquies (the one where Andrei's first wife dies got to me), the scene where Rostova dances in the caretaker's place (also the best scene in the book, by the way). Yes, it's a little dated - everyone seems to act too much with their faces, and the voiceovers tend to be a tad much at times - but it's par for the course. What I minded was the third part bringing this movie down. It recovers somewhat during the fourth, but you realize it's no longer a masterpiece as you'd formerly hoped. Also, Bezukhov (Bondarchuk himself, sadly) is too old and too fat.

Polanski_Fan Having read the novel and seen the full version just now, in one sitting, in a theater (Film Forum in NYC), it is an incomparable experience and one of the two or three best novel-adaptations ever made. The cinematography and set-pieces are phenomenal (the budget was $700 million) and the story of course is one of history's greats.Some stuff from the novel gets cut, and the "war" scenes are far more memorable than the "peace" parts, but the entire "Part Two," which focuses entirely on Natalie, would be a great romantic film entirely to itself.In short, it is like "The Leopard," "Gone with the Wind," Abel Ganz' "Napoleon," and "Spartacus" rolled into one masterpiece. However, I don't know that one could sit through this on DVD. But if you don't live in NY this week, I don't know when else you will have the chance to see it on the big screen, where it really is jaw-dropping.

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.

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.