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Originally Posted by jackhammer
There has been a whole slew of medieval/fantasy films over the last couple of years and most of them have sucked TBH but this is definitely one of the best of the bunch.
No sparkly white teeth, dodgy accents, beautiful sunsets or cutesy fights. It's brutal, bloody, has a base in actual history and looks stunning. All mist and rain and when someone gets hit by a sword they stay hit. The story is slight but it the overall execution makes up for that. |
To me, Ironclad was very mediocre. It was entertaining, but not very much so and in the end, I felt there wasn't really much about it that was memorable. Paul Giamatti as King John was awful, but James Purefoy was good as the lead character. Overall, I think I actually preferred Solomon Kane (which he also stars in) for entertainment value.
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Originally Posted by Alfred
Did not know what to make of this at all. Interesting dialogue, but the story was very slow, and not much of anything really happened in the end.
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Originally Posted by LoathsomePete
Yeah it's one of those movies that you'll either love or hate, and if you're in the latter camp you'll probably have suspicions that the people who love it are just pretentious artsy film students who will love anything that shakes the status quo. I'm still undecided where I stand, I don't know if I can respect myself if I fall into the artsy film student camp, but there were some genuinely tense moments that stuck with me, the meat grinder section in particular. I'm also a huge fan of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. computer games, which took huge inspiration from this movie, so that may be playing on my opinion. On the other hand, I agree with you about the ending and the pacing of the story. Still, if nothing else you've earned some major film nerd cred for watching it.
I would recommend looking up the novel it was loosely based on, Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky.
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I felt there was just about nothing entertaining happening in this film and so it has to offer something else. It didn't do that well enough (imo) and so the movie did not manage to keep my interest. Overall, I didn't feel it was quite deep or artsy enough to justify it being so tremendously slow.
It's a bit sad because I am highly intrigued by the setting and this movie felt like it didn't really explore the opportunities of its own world that much.
Some interesting trivia is that all that toxic sludge is really toxic sludge. Several involved involved in the production, including Tarkovsky, died from illnesses they likely got as a result from exposure to all that poison.