'Mongol': the epic tale of Ghengis Khan

By Roger Moore The Orlando Sentinel

Hard places make for hard men, history has taught us. The conquistadors of Estremadura, the Apache of the desert Southwest and untold generations of Afghans bear this out.

Toughest of all were the Mongols, warriors hammered on the anvil of the bare, windswept steppes of central Asia. They stole, ­kidnapped and murdered among themselves for ­generations before ­unifying as a people and consequently running rampant over China, Russia and much of the Eastern and Western world in the 1200s. These were the guys who made the Dark Ages really dark.

Mongol is Sergei Bodrov's awesome epic about how that all began, the evolution of 9-year-old Temudjin, orphaned son of a khan, enslaved, tormented and tested by the steppes until he grew up to become the leader the world remembers as Genghis Khan.

With a painter's eye for the brown, green, gray and white beauty of the steppes and a flair for finding poetry, myth and romance in a harsh and bloody tale, Bodrov (Prisoner of the Mountains, ­Nomad) shows us the hard, brave and stubborn boy who became a harder, braver man.

Temudgin (Tadanobu Asano, magnificent) comes close to death many times, is captured and put in stocks many times and forgets no kindness, but also no threat, insult or slight as he plots his revenge. At age 9, he chose his wife, Borte (Khulan Chuluun, lovely, earthy, tough), and he chose well. She tempers his temper. She endures much, granting him the will to endure more. And she gives the counsel that will someday evolve into his ”Mongol laws,“ the ingredients of unity that allowed the minor khan to become the Great Khan, scourge of China and the West.

The blood brother (the film showcases the similarities ­between Mongol customs and those of ­nomadic Plains Indians) who e_SDHprescued Temudgin was Jamukha, who grew up to be his greatest ­rival. ­Mongol benefits from ­having a most charismatic villain, as Honglei Sun plays this guy as a dry, funny foe who stretches and cracks his neck before making any decision.

Any movie made by a Russian about Mongols is going to have a hint of cautionary allegory about it, a little ”beware the Beast of the East“ foreshadowing. But the director (who co-wrote the script) is more interested in making this a history lesson, a love story, an ­essay in management techniques and a primer on medieval ­warfare. You don't have to see clunky knights in armor fumbling to fight warriors at one with their horses to see why the West was so powerless against them.

Bodrov's Oscar-nominated film, in Mongolian with English subtitles, so thoroughly covers Temudgin's formative years, with his frequent trips to a god-shrine to pray to a wolf for aid, that the film has to skip over a vital, last stretch in the ”secret history of the Mongols,“ namely Temudgin's recruiting drive that took him from solo warrior to tribal leader, then khan. Better to have cut off the story earlier than to leave that ”team building“ out.

But Mongol, from its thrilling battles to its intimate romance, has the look, scale, story and feel of an old-fashioned epic in the best and biggest sense of the word.