gitapar

The potential is there but the female lead is completely miscast and drags the quality down. She has neither the acting chops nor charisma to pull off such a flawed character and looks like a 40 year old pretending to be 20 years younger than she is. The male lead on the other hand is convincing expressing the struggles of immortality without being a boring, brooding vampire sucker that sparkles and you want to slap senseless. The moody cinematography and electronic music works great. I think with tighther editing, a different female main lead and better marketing this would have been an international hit.

Good and sometimes poignant movie. The white savior complex in full swing directed by Spielberg. It's the African American actors who steal the show and save an otherwise preachy and horribly heavy-handed movie. Other reviewer pointed out that Morgan Freeman was underused and i'm inclined to agree. On the other hand, Hopkins' screen time could've been cut in half and I wouldn't have felt I lost anything of value. Djimon (Cinque) shines playing the former Mende tribal leader. As does Yamba, another enslaved Mende tribesman, a character who gets his hands on the Bible trying to learn and understand white American culture and religion. In the most moving scene of the film he pages through an illustrated Bible and while pointing to different pictures how a child was born who selflessly cared for others, was ultimately killed for it. "Everywhere he goes," says Yamba, "he is followed by the sun." "Cinque shakes his head, insisting, "He must have done something." "Why?" asks Yamba, in a one-word question that captures all the injustice of slavery. "What did we do?" Then, with tears in his eyes, he asks Cinque: "Do you want to see how they killed him?"" "They took him into a cave. They wrapped him in cloth, like we do. They thought he was dead, but he appeared before his people again and he spoke to them. Then, finally, he rose into the sky."

"This is where the soul goes when you die here," Yamba continues. "This is where we're going when they kill us." The final illustration is one depicting heaven as a place filled with glorious light. Stroking the picture gently with his fingers, Yamba concludes, "It doesn't look so bad."

Source: from wikipreacher(dot)org.