Medieval

I love Ben Foster. I think he chooses excellent movies.

I could maybe make out 30% of the dialogue in this movie. The audio is absolutely atrocious. The acting is good, the cinematography is great... So the fact that you simply cannot understand any dialogue is beyond glaring. It's not even the accents. If the dialogue isn't being drowned out by the unnecessary loud and booming bass, the spoken words are just unintelligible. I cannot believe a movie with this kind of cast would have these kind of issues.

There were also several spots with obvious editing issues. Where the characters mouth did not match up with the words the audience was hearing. Which just goes to show that no one who produced this movie bothered to actually watch it. Amateur stuff.

With a plot that is already hard to follow as others have mentioned, these issues made the movie nearly unwatchable. Super disappointed.

Instead, it felt generic, rushed with over emphasis on fighting. This is a true story, based on real events and real people. We have the historical data on all of them yet in the movie, they are vaguely mentioned in intro and outro credits.

The in between or the movie itself is a random series of fights between groups that are not developed well; we feel no emphathy for them, nor do we even know who they are. The movie is also not historically accurate in terms of setting, mannerism, props. It is just generic medieval fighting movie with a backstory that the viewer has to create in their mind as they watch. If you do that, it becomes better sure, but on its own, as a movie as presented, it lacks a lot.

The events this attempts to cover are pivotal for the time and could have easily been on the level of development we saw in braveheart and gladiator; but alas they opted for shallowness. Acting is not great, not bad but not great, acceptable at best. If it were not based on the true events it attempts to cover, it would have stood better for what it was. Unfortunately the creators trying to make it real life historical completely bombed the pooch here. There was no need for it because there is no history in this movie; none, at all. I guess they felt it added extra importance to the movie by telling us who it was about and what events it tried to convey but that's about it. Few lines on the screen that do not match what we saw, do not a historical movie make.

It is watchable, just highly disappointing, having ruined such an amazing potential story. I understand it is difficult to properly convey things so far back in history where records were so vague about a lot of things, however look at how other movies approached it. This simply does not even feel in the right time period. It feels a lot like generic sword fight at your local fair ground. Granted the fighting was not horrible but again, without any other context being done proper, it just becomes a generic sword fight movie.

I know it's 2022 and everyone is a critic and negativity is all anyone brings to the table. I'm the opposite. I'd rather tell you what I liked about something, so here we go.

• Loved the action sequences, and the violence
• Loved the battlefield tactics.

• Excellent cast (besides Til Schweiger)

-Beautiful cinematography

• Perfect ending

I noticed a few editing issues and some dialogue problems. But overall I had a blast with this film. Ben Foster obviously took this role seriously and I always enjoy his work. Michael Caine is the man, and even at his age he still delivers a solid performance. Matthew Goode impressed me in "The Offer" earlier this year so I was interested to see him in this villainous role, he knocks it out of the park. I will definitely be adding this movie to my collection when available.

Enjoy!

Unlike most of the negative low ratings against this movie that almost made me decide to not viewing it and, even when I finally decided to give it a try, my expectation was still not quite high enough to give it a full shot. But this movie turned out to be pretty good actually. Yes, this movie got a serious audio and soundtrack problems. The dialog between or among the characters sometimes was too low or too vague to be heard clearly, and most of the time was blocked by the annoying loud soundtrack which supposedly should be in the background and subtle enough to support the ongoing of the story, but sadly, the music often played too loud and over-the-top dominant over the scenes, and lot of times too religiously annoying. It also made me wonder if the production team hired a qualified enough audio professional group to handle the recording or microphone. It seems that there were lot of times, the microphone was placed either too far away or too high to record the characters dialog so that always ended up either too vague or too low to be heard clearly. The crew who took care of the audio part of this movie should never be hired by any other movie makers in case to cause the similar problems.

There are so many negative reviews against this movie, but to me, it's a decent and seriously made one, at least worth watching once for your time and money. Ben Foster did a very good job, but the screenplay didn't give him too much to develop and show the character he played. Michael Caine also faithfully did his part, even it's such a weightless role. Sophie Lowe also acted well for her tragic role in this movie, but luckily, her character was much well developed as the storyline went on.

The fighting scenes are well arranged, brutal, bloody and realistic enough to make you cringe sometimes. Again, the faulty audio almost ruined everything!

Since two decades now, medieval movies from Europe, Eastern Europe are galore, more gruesome one than the other, huge budgets for huge craps most of the time, available mainly un streaming platforms. Most of those lousy productions bet only on gruesome battles, bloody, brutal, battle scenes, where cruelty is the main word. Besides this, nothing at all, bad directing and I don't even speak of the acting. This one is from Czech Republic but seems to be co produced with UK film industry; it is spoken in English and stars Ben Foster and Michael Caine. So, it won't be a surprise if I say it is not for the sissies, it is bloody, with man details concerning meat chopper fight sequences. But the story is not that bad for such a film, not that bad. However, it will never make me forget THE WARLORD, starring Chuck Heston; FLESH AND BLOOD from director Paul Verhoeven, or any Ridley Scott's movie for this scheme.