Watching Kutuzov is kind of like watching a Shakespearean play. Everything is dark with misery, but done in a really overly dramatic and exciting Style.
This film recounts The Story of Napoleon's Grand Invasion to Russia and his subsequent failure due to starvation, bad equipment, horrible weather and a Russian borderline ludicrousy in burning their own lands to ensure you have nothing to supply yourself with as you plunge yourself deeper and deeper into the continent size Nation.
Now that's not exactly a unique narrative.
The invasion of Russia by Napoleon has been told hundreds of times by just about every major Nation on Earth.
It's just that captivating of a story. But what makes this one oddly unique is it strange circumstance to then present day World War 2.
That one being the Nazis attempt at invading the Soviet Union and ultimately ending up with a similar result. Though the Nazis never actually made it into Moscow. And their legacy was far less impressive than that of Napoleon.
I was expecting there to be a hell of a lot more grandiose speeches and boasting about the absolutely military prowess of the Russian Empire or even just of its people.
You know, trying to spin modern Soviet imagery into the past.
But actually it doesn't go down that rabbit hole too much. You get one grandiose speech with Kutuzov where he goes on about the glory of the Fatherland and the fighting will of its people. But it's just fairly standard military talk. There is one moment where Napoleon is shown as this shrivelled looking sad munchkin of a man, with his hair parting such that he kind of looks like Hitler. But once again it's not trying to be too heavy-handed in that regard either.
Our respective historical characters are just being themselves if not a little boisterous. But then it's a military drama and this is the Napoleonic era when rectangle boastful personality was the norm.
The actual story is just a retelling of blanks military campaign as he confronts Napoleon's Grand Army and eventually pushes them back past the Russian lines. And that's literally as far as I guess. I was expecting part of the movie to show the Russian forces pushing them into Paris sent going on for a final attack but they didn't bother with that. Maybe it had something to do with World War II again. You don't want to show your army invading the enemies Capital when in reality you haven't done the same yourself. Should have given it to more years.
The acting overall is pretty good. Aleksei Dikij performs and looks pretty darn similar to Kutuzov. And Semyon Mezhinsky looks almost identical to Napoleon. Doesn't have the same personality but then this movie isn't trying to portray Napoleon in any sort of positive light.
Costume designers pretty darn good, the sets are decent. Nothing that'll stick out in your mind but they do okay. There's a recreated miniature of Moscow that looks pretty cool, although half the time it's on fire so it's hard to tell. Would love to see what that thing looks like Anna Godzilla flick.
One of the things I personally enjoyed about this movie is that it doesn't deviate from the military campaign.
It shows all the generals walking about And discussing what they're going to do next and we can get a few character moments with some of the lower life soldiers but it never focuses on them. There's no needless dialogue with peons in the army or, God forbid some romantic story-line to pad out the run-time and give it bigger audience appeal. It's just a straight-up military campaign and it's fairly well done.
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