Espada de Deus - A Última Cruzada

This piece of art is like a blackmetal music video in feature length. Someone who is into medieval stuff & ancient tribes will be satisfied. The visual power of the sceneries & the portray of interpersonal conflicts are astonishing. Besides the cast being local actors, it's a well-written script with authentic characters. The atmosohere is getting progressively threatening while it moulds into a climax of the story. Both main characters profit from eachother as opponents to really shine next to eachother. Both of them are highly emotional within their acting & still manage not to outshine one another.

This is a pretty dark, but interesting experimental movie about the Middle Ages. A lot of strange things happened in those times, and this movie gives a special impression about it. Pagans, Christianity, strange rituals & beliefs... It was quite a spiritual experience with a lot of different factions, and this movie gives an eyewitness account about it. Probably it's far from 100% authentic, but probably many tribes had similar lives. Also, there are some interesting twists in the story, but I won't spoil those, watch it to experience it yourself... ☺

Another fictional presentation of a historical content. It is a missed opportunity by Bartosz Konopka to present a narrative that could highlight how Native European tribes were erased from existence by Christianity, the great colonizer , out of Africa, Ancient Dynastic Egypt. Christianity entered Europe through Ireland - onward to England crossing the North Sea into the lowlands - Willibrord was the zealot who destroyed thousands of tribes. Radbod was the last remaining Native European who stood his ground. The content of this movie is soo perverse, that a king from nowhere would give Willibrord his bishop ring and order Willibrord to kill his son- Only in Poland can they dream up such darkness while totally ignoring history - too lazy to dig in real history. The movie is just raw sadism, bloody, torture, abuse, exploitation of human emotions, exactly what Christianity is in all its glory. Precisely what all religions are in essence, human hostile, an enemy of life. Take a look at Native Tribes around the world and realize what Monotheism, Out of Africa, did to Europe and 1500 years later, the Vatican invents colonialism and send this Christian modified European on a goose chase to Americas while the ancient maps of America sit in the library of the Vatican. Directors like Bartosz Konopka could do a better job instead of making religious propaganda, painting native European tribes as savages, retards, and idiots, which, most certainly, they were not. The only folks who laugh and enjoy this sort sit in the Vatican cheering the ignorance of moviemakers. This myth of Christ produced 2025 years of warfare, abuse of power and produced astronomical wealth for an institution that thrives on Child Abuse.

The other reviewer summed it up nicely too. This is not a movie that someone who's into Hollywood Blockbusters will like. The Viking themed movies (or those feeling like that) have been flooding our screens - especially since the very succecsful TV show Vikings. This I would say is also not something for fans of that show - for most fans of that show.

Almost nothing is happening (or you may get that impression at least) for most of the time .. until an outburst of violence towards the end. But by then, you will either have given up on the movie or you already have bought into the style and tone of it. This really is not something for the masses, but those who dig it, will cherish it. Very well done from a technical standpoint (grim) and costume department as well

Much more than an atmospheric movie, as I read somewhere, this is an expressionist one. Grimy art direction and fisrt-person camera are combined to provide the spectator the feeling of early christianization missions: fearsome, unpredictable and ethnocentric. The Polish movie, in order to heighten that feeling, unveils very little information, and even the Germanic dialect of the pagan natives is nearly never followed by subtitles. We do know that there was a Christian king who could attack pagan tribes, that one of the two unrelated missionaries was a bishop, and that the whiteclay-painted people worshipped Slavic god Perun and goddess Mokosh. Therefore, a good guess is that the aforementioned ruler could be Mieszko, and the story happened some time after the beginning of his reign; given the actor's age, it may be in the 970s. The bishop could be inspired in Jordan, although the name of that character in the script was Willibrord, the very name of a later Anglo-Saxon bishop who lived elsewhere, in the Netherlands; if it were Jordan, the first Polish bishop, the year would be 968. Anyway, more important than historical accuracy (about a time whixh knowledge about is not accurate either) is the immersive experience in Middle Ages far from so-called civilized settlements. It is also a truer narrative about how European nation-states were born than the usual laudatory ones.