If you like great period costumes and lavish settings you will like this shallow effort. If you want information about this Russian empress pick up a history book.
Personally, I had never heard of this film before I ran into it on YouTube. Now I understand why. For one thing the casting is dreadful. Look, I know the white race has been rendered very unpopular lately by the reverse-racist "multiculturalists," but anybody who's ever seen a portrait of CTG knows she was a fair-skinned, blonde and blue-eyed woman of rather ample proportions (don't take my word for it; pick any biography with her picture on the cover). Therefore, I found the olive-skinned, dark-haired/eyed slim Catherine Zeta-Jones distracting and annoying. Somebody already mentioned Jeanne Moreau and Omar Shariff so I won't go over that again. Add to that the fact that the history is wobbly at best and you've got pretty much all you need to know to make up your mind if you want to invest time on this film.
Forgettable.
Personally, I had never heard of this film before I ran into it on YouTube. Now I understand why. For one thing the casting is dreadful. Look, I know the white race has been rendered very unpopular lately by the reverse-racist "multiculturalists," but anybody who's ever seen a portrait of CTG knows she was a fair-skinned, blonde and blue-eyed woman of rather ample proportions (don't take my word for it; pick any biography with her picture on the cover). Therefore, I found the olive-skinned, dark-haired/eyed slim Catherine Zeta-Jones distracting and annoying. Somebody already mentioned Jeanne Moreau and Omar Shariff so I won't go over that again. Add to that the fact that the history is wobbly at best and you've got pretty much all you need to know to make up your mind if you want to invest time on this film.
Forgettable.