Change Your Image
Stokkolm
Ratings
Most Recently Rated
Lists
An error has ocurred. Please try againReviews
No Man's Land (2001)
Not deserving it's reputation
This movie has the same rating as Underground by Emir Kusturica and i expected it to be at least half as good, but in reality it's not even remotely close to that masterpiece. But some people praise it as a realistic take on war, maybe the most realistic ever. Well, if you want realistic take on war watch The Hurt Locker. No Man's Land is basically the Hollywood version of that. Even the first Rambo is more realistic and deeper in some ways. Why? Many thing happening in the movie make no sense, for example Ciki looks like a calm guy, he didn't lose his judgement when he was struck by a tank projectile, no he just went to search for a cigar to smoke. But after being saved, he makes the dumb decision of threatening a whole army with a pistol, what was he thinking? That action did not fit the character of Ciki we saw earlier. This is just a sign of amateurish plot design. And the french UN sergeant, he defied his superiors and risked his life just for a mission he didn't even knew what was about until he got there.
As a tragedy it was hard to feel bad for any of the main characters, they are not very sympathetic, and they don't show enough of their personality to make you care for them. If a situation like this was real maybe i would, but then again you hear stuff like this on TV often, and it's about innocent civilians. I only felt bad for the UN soldiers that wasted their time trying to save 2 people that didn't want their help.
It's not a that bad movie, but almost everything it shows has been done better somewhere else.
The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey (1988)
It has flaws, but it's a film you'd not be ashamed to have on your personal top 10
I watched this movie with little expectations and it managed to surpass them. I stood and thought why it isn't more acclaimed, since it has many elements that stand up compared to more well known films. I realized Navigator's main flaw is it doesn't succeed to induce the right state of mind to the audience from the very beginning. If you watch Terminator 2 expecting a realistic SF you'd find many things making no sense, but if you watch it with the action movie conventions in mind you find everything it's on it's place. Every single movie needs to make the viewer familiar with it's rules and conventions, to set him in the right mood. Navigator has a pretty ambiguous beginning, and it's not very consistent after that either, leaving me confused at times if i'm watching a kids fairytale with some serious undertones, an actually profound artistic movie, or just an exploitation on the concept of "what if medieval people traveled in our time".
Otherwise everything else about Navigator: A Mediaeval Odyssey is great. The characters are very well designed, when i was a kid i had myself an idol like Connor (we probably all did), the man that is a natural leader, knows every time what is right and doesn't afraid of anything. But in real life even this kind of persons are still human beings, they mess up sometimes, they lose hope sometimes, no one's perfect, and i really liked this little touch of humanity Connor has. Ulf even though he's the oldest in the group he's the clumsiest and most insecure. He's still a child at heart, even more than Griffin, the actual child. The fact that his friends care about him so much despite him being more of a liability to their mission is really touching. Overall all medieval characters are very realistic compared to what we see in the genre.
Maybe some people that watched this movie would expect the reactions of the medieval villagers to the modern city to be different, more powerful. The truth is, it's hard to imagine how would such people react in a situation like that, and i can't think of films that get this aspect right and believable, but i think Navigator comes quite close. There was a lot of unknown during that ages, and for the villagers of a remote mine everything was new, a big medieval city would be just as new and strange as a modern city with skyscrapers, cars and trains. They expected to see strange things, and they saw strange things, not too much reason to get overexcited.
Somewhere about 6-7.