A Knight's War

I was pleasantly surprised on how well made this movie was. Realistic armor, great CGI, choreography that made sense. Those are all things that you hardly ever see later.

The practical effects instead of just using CGI made it even better as it just feels like a dying art more and more it was a breath of fresh air.

Art direction itself was fitting to the story.

Acting wasnt stunning but also wasnt hard to watch.

Story: While it wasn´t anything groundbreaking and could do a bit better on worldbuilding. It was still enjoyable and made sense.

All in all I am happy to recommend this movie to friends and would love them to create more like this.

I really love these old school type fantasy / action films with good vs evil etc.

The only thing that's lets it down is the budget, some special effects seem cheap but everything else is solid, the acting, action and story.

I don't really understand the bad reviews, they clearly went to some effort to make a solid film here, which in my opinion doesn't fall on deaf ears.

Similar vein to the film Solomon Kane, and if you haven't seen that one then I highly recommend it also.

Give it a shot, not bad at all, not going to give away any story elements here but it also reminded me of computer games like The Witcher or something.

Knights verses witches and demons, what's not to love?

I'll keep this simple (like my mental state...) This starts off well with a great look and atmosphere, and even a clever touch of humour here and there.

But, sadly, after about 20 minutes or so it begins to lose its focus, and its hold on the audience. To me, the forward momentum just kind of stops as the scenes around this time are just very SLOW, drawn out torture in a sense. That does not a good movie make and for me personally is just a very lazy default to an unnecessarily lowest denominator.

That is too bad, really, because I think there was a fairly decent, if not terribly original idea here, but someone definitely dropped the ball in my lowly and wretched opinion. The look and mood though I feel could have been very effective, if there were a decent story to go along with it.

To be fair, I am not a huge fan of these kinds of Sword & Sorcery films (with the exception of course of the excellent 'BEASTMASTER', 'CONAN', 'KRULL', and perhaps a few others) but, especially with such a strong, dark beginning, it is a shame that whomever was behind the actual storytelling to me just simply didn't seem that terribly interested.

I gave it a VERY generous '5' because of the nice look of it and the good look and atmosphere, but if you are looking for an entertaining and compelling story, I'm afraid this isn't it...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~MY PARTICULAR WAY OF RATING:

5 - Flawed, but with some entertainment value.

6. A decently passable story maybe worth a watch.

7. A solid film, well made, effective, and entertaining.

And, obviously, you can probably figure out what above and below these would mean... : )

(Maybe, this statement below which was my original Title was why my first review was declined, IDK... Let me try added it down here)

Yes, a lot of these '10' reviews are clearly plants. But, the '1' star ones are not justified either...

This film is ambitious, it's atmospheric, moody and serious. The costumes are beautiful, the sets and locations are too. The cinematography, score and CGI helps with building this world, and the actors were great.

The flaws: this film needed some early critical editing to the story. There was potential for a unique fantasy world to emerge, but I think what we saw was a patch job of various narrative tropes mixed together.

I think clarity, directness, and the courage to propose/build one's own fantastical world would have had a more weighty creative impact on the viewer and it would have helped immerse oneself into someone else's imagination.

I do not want to discourage anyone from seeing this movie! It is incredibly impressive what can be done by motivated creatives, and it's still very fun. Give it a shot if you have the opportunity!

All in all this film is pretty good.

The negatives: The dialogue writing is poor. Often very cliched, sometimes totally random and at times does not sound natural at all.

The acting is very hit and miss. The main actors seemed to struggle with the material, so sometimes they do a good job and other times not so much. The supporting actors were on the whole very good I thought.

The positives: The art and costume design is fantastic and considering the budget quite astonishing. All involved need to be given a big budget feature soon.

The mythology/setting is interesting and, while somewhat derivative, it holds together really well.

The character arcs for the protagonists were well done and made sense.

The mood of the film was spot on.

On the whole a decent effort, if you like fantasy and don't mind a smaller budget film then give this a go.