That's the question I asked myself at least 18 or 19 times throughout the film, from start to near end. The whole thing is utterly baffling, not just in terms of the completely incoherent plot with even more incoherent characters, but in terms of the baffling design choices and costumes.
"Inexplicable" defines a large amount of this movie, through and through. Inexplicably it was listed as Recommended to me based on my having watched a completely unrelated film of a different genre by Netflix. Inexplicably I thought it was some manner of post-apocalyptic pseudo-medieval fantasy type thing, like "Into the Badlands" only far enough ahead that all traces of Old Earth are gone. There's even a split-second shot of two planets colliding that could explain how and why Earth and its civilizations get wiped out and revert to a medieval fantasy-esque world.
but apparently that is not the case. On top of that, this feels very much like a Fantasy setting that is trapped in its own world, like Lord of the Rings and middle earth, with no time for explaining anything or trying to integrate the audience. At the very least, Lord of the Rings was actually fun, and not plagued by visual and story choices that can only be described as "inexplicable".
The film starts with presumably the protagonist's prologue as a child. His father is training him to fight in a cliché sequence complete with the unexpected "child knocks the father upside the head and the father smiles and thinks He is Ready" instance. Then we boom ahead to some minor lore involving a King and a prophecy, and now the protagonist is older and a warrior.
The fight scene that unfolds is brief and tiny, involving only 6 or 7 people, tops, and the only weapon used is a club. I assumed this was meant to depict an ambush by the protagonist against a village, perhaps a raid, but it turns out he is going directly after some desert king. A KING. And this king lives in a single tent, basically, with like 8 personal guards who are unarmed and unarmored. The protagonist kills the king and takes his daughter as a "sacrifice" to the emperor. At no point is any "emperor" mentioned ever again later on.
The costume design seems to just be a scattershot amalgamation of what ever pieces of costume they could rummage together, with no particular coherency or relation to real world cultures or styles. The tribe that the Warrior guy stumbles upon are all dressed like Luke Skywalker on Tattooine with inexplicably wide open collars and necklaces, and proceeds to help train them to fight some evil king of a "Dominion" that is swarming the lands harassing villages and tribes.
The entirety of the training turns out to basically be small little fistfights. At no point does anyone use a weapon of any sort, and at times the trainees just go about and break each other's arms during training.
The small village has a beautiful Princess who the Warrior thought he saw rescue him beside a lake but she says it never happened. She doesn't want the small tribe to go to war, and does nothing to try to stop them or persuade them otherwise. Inexplicably, the Warrior guy demands that he take the Princess, and inexplicably the tribes leader guy Aysel basically agrees and turns her over like a lamed horse.
Inexplicably, this tribe goes off to fight with absolutely no weapons and no armor, and are depicted BEFORE a battle sparring in a cave, BREAKING EACH OTHERS ARMS. Somehow, the Warrior and the Princess end up somewhere else in another village, where the Warrior is back to training people in fistfighting, when the Dominion arrives and sacks the village and kidnaps all the people.
At this point, I completely spaced out, lost track of a few minutes, and suddenly the Warrior guy is in front of the Dominion's King, who inexplicably looks like he's wearing over-sized novelty vampire teeth and is perpetually cringing and mincing as he struggles to act around them teeth. He proceeds to try to kill the Warrior by having him fight his own warriors one on one.
It somehow took me until this point to realize that there's almost no actual weapons in this film. All the fight sequences thus far have involved fistfighting or a VERY brief appearance by a club, a short sword, or a scythe. I cannot believe that this film had the budget to use some astonishingly decent visual effects yet didn't have a budget for more than 3 or 4 swords or more than 1 helmet. There's absolutely no explanation in-universe or any indirect suggestion that something happened as to why no one has any weapons. People just fistfight and act like they're in a glorious battle out of Tolkien.
So at some point, this mincing vampire king is revealed to be the father of the Princess, who mysteriously appears and begs her father not to kill the Warrior, and she will rule his kingdom as he wants. So he agrees and orders the Warrior guy released.
Despite this, he is inexplicably NOT released but tied up and left to die again, while inexplicably Aysel re-appears, now apparently part of the Dominion and wearing their Jaguar Knight armor, and gets randomly killed by the Warrior during a flashback or hallucination scene of some sort.
Then the Princess murders her mincing vampire father, finds the Warrior guy again, and somehow goes back in time, where it's revealed she did indeed rescue the Warrior guy by the lake, in the future.
Then the movie just ends, with an equally inexplicable epilogue showing the Desert Princess from the beginning, now an older woman, casually walking around and smiling, apparently not dead or "sacrificed" to the nonexistent emperor.
Then it all just ends.
This movie began as a confusing, boring thing which, the further it went along, further evolved into a baffling, inexplicable mess of scenes with no natural transition and no natural connection to each other. This is a film which genuinely feels to me like it was not so much written and directed so much as assembled by an AI that was designed for something other than writing or filmmaking.
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