Most people behind this film are Italians, and you can tell that from the design: theatrical almost operatic story, colorful staging, great imagination, playful development of characters and story, florid fabulation and great joy of epic story-telling - most of the production names are De Laurentiis. All this makes up for not a bad movie at all. In fact, the story is not incredible, although utterly untruthful, and both Ben Kingsley and Colin Firth make credible characters and performances enough. Focus is though on the boy, who is the only thoroughly splendid character, both as an invention, the type and his development and acting. What actually happened is unknown, but both Odovakar and Romulus are historical figures. In the film the events of Romulus' abdication occur in 460 after having been emperor for no more than a year, while it actually happened in 476 but is historically correct. No one knows what happened to Romulus, however - his fate is lost in history, and his young character and mystery is like made for legends. Odovakar did not remain king of Rome very long, being soon overthrown by Theoderic the Great of the Ostrogoths. Vortigern, the awful villain of the film, did exist but remains a rather doubtful character - in the film he is grossly exaggerated to fit the role of a supreme villain, a tyrant of great paranoia and cruelty, while some sources name him the discoverer of Merlin. A great epic adventure film made on a great epic story, in brief, a worthwhile entertainment with the positive consequence that it must raise your interest in the darkest medieval history.

I expected an entertaining costume movie about Romans, but after a while it looked rather like an "Asterix and Obelix" soft-action movie. The only bright spot was the appearance of Aishwarya Rai Bachchan. The Romans should worship her. What a divine body.The movie was of a high "Bud Spencer" level with Goths flying around in the sky, after which Mira appears gloating. Then there was Thomas Brodie-Sangster who had the same facial expression the entire film (excellent performance when you take that in mind). Kingsley starts as a nicely played counselor/teacher/philosopher (beautiful scene in the beginning of the film), but slowly evolves into an irritating magician. Him being Merlin was a complete surprise and a sign for me to start rolling my eyeballs.I didn't care whether the film is historically accurate. I was hoping for an entertaining movie, but got a faint pathetic historical epos with men in skirts.More reviews at http://opinion-as-a-moviefreak.blogspot.be/

Usually when a movie is bad, I just let it a pass and don't say anything because others will be doing that. In this extreme case, I have to drive another nail into the coffin.Plenty of money was spent on costumes, on-location shooting and some actors whose names you will notice and an actress who will look good no matter what she is doing. That is where you can end the positives. Everything else is very low quality and in some cases, unbelievably bad. What you get is a children's fantasy comic book with stiff acting, cliché writing and nonsensical fight choreography. One keeps hoping that if they had the wisdom and integrity to shoot on site and not resort to computers that the awkwardness will end and a good stretch of the movie will begin. It never happens. Rai and Kingsley are especially misused/miscast although Rai of course looks good always. They have to milk her looks quite hard as nothing else goes well. Even the good locations are not used to their full potential.

I read the book and it wasn't that bad either. Sure it had quite some clichés and was very predictable...we could say Hollywood-ish, but was decent enough fun.Seeing the movie i'm quite disappointed. It's not just that the plot is almost entirely different, many parts changed, a lot of them discarded. What is much worse than that, is that it has quite poor directing. Events just hope around with very little intermezzos, the story is poorly shown and it has even more clichés than the book. Many times it just gets annoying and confusing. The whole move feels extremely rushed forward.The acting isn't bad, in my opinion it has lots of potential, but it's just a shame how badly executed it was.I'm really disappointed by this movie, it had potential to be a decent piece on par with gladiator and king Arthur, but it falls very short.I highly recommend you get the book first and watch the movie after.