Had to get that little South Parkism out of my system. It emerged unbidden from my lips right after the scene when the Chinese monk tells the mandarin not to buy that particular slave because of what the monk could see in their future…

But really, that’s the only laugh in a pretty grim and glorious picture. The soundtrack alone - full of fantastic throat-singing and that steppes-version of a proto-guitar whose name I forget but is something like the igyl (maybe I’ll look it up later and edit this but it’s past my bedtime) - kept me very excited and involved in the action and the story.

My film companion complained of some lacunae that he ascribed to continuity problems but they seemed to me to pretty much correspond to holes in the actual received history/legend and didn’t bother me at all. In fact, it added greatly to that larger than life feel NOT to have seen how Temujin escaped from the slave collar as a boy or escaped the ice hole; gave it a nice, mysterious, quasi-mystical quality that I quite liked, and prefer to some halfwit’s version of how it might have happened.

And Borte needs a place in any canon of ass-kicking heroines. The actress who played her did it exactly right: she didn’t ever shriek or in any way act “fierce”, just placidly presented her husband with the necessary faits accompli: the rapist with the slit throat, the key to the jail, whatever was needed, with no carping about how she did it or what she endured. Wow.

The battle scenes, too, were pretty fantastic, on a Bondarchukian scale, realistic without being overly gory (you may complain that they liked their blood spatter effect a whole lot, but they did resist almost always the temptation to linger on the actual slashes and impalings that made the blood spatter the way certain other crews [300, anyone?] did).

All in all, I think I’ll have to get this on DVD to go alongside the Branagh Henry V and the Bondarchuk War and Peace and yes, 300 as great war films with that something extra.