The Legend of Suriyothai – 0

Suriyothai- One of the first movies to fail my three day movie test ™ in quite a while. I’m not sure why it drove me bonkers, but it did. You see, I *wanted* to like this movie. I think it was oversold and was billed as “important” so it’s easy to knock off it’s peg.

Let’s start with the negative first- the movie tells the tale of an important, historically-based legend. It’s a long soap-opera with a lot of plot twists that covers a huge span of time. Okay, so if you have a historical flick, things are gonna get cut out. But that’s problematic with the limitations of a film’s timeframe.

Since the story is based on historical events foreigners like me won’t grasp some subtleties and the historical context, so narration or extra scenes/lines?/backstories? need to be added.

Adding, removing – what’s a director to do? I’m not sure. But what they did here was make a great looking movie that tries to make the best of the long story it tries to tell.

The critical build up was to a final battle/confrontation and that was over and done with in a few minutes. It detracted from the whole effort. The whole story is about this Princess/Queen/Royal Family member who’s going to be making this *huge* sacrifice in a battle for her people. Then when it happens, it’s just, hrm, odd. . . Her actions seem almost hasty and dumb. There must be more to it though- the whole royal blood lines and how royals are supposed to act. . .

Okay, enough (mild)ranting and rambling. There’s a 5 hour version of this flick, but I’m not going to watch it. Supposedly the Coppola team which was involved in the editing of this flick cut a ton of stuff out to make this ponderous tale coherent.

Is there anything good about the movie? Sure- it looks great. The tales of the royal court are intriguing. But the best thing? HUGE ASS ELEPHANT BATTLES!! How cool is that?

It’s cool- but not enough to recommend this movie. Go watch Ong Bak instead.

By the way- I know some people who watch any movie that was nominated for the Academy Awards. I think this was nominated for best foreign language flick, but I need to look that up.