Review of Seven Years in Tibet (1997) by Marcello C — 09 Dec 2015

78%.

Saw this on 9/12/15.

This film is like Dances with Wolves, it's got all the potential to be an explosively pompous epic, it could have easily been another Schindler's list, all it had to do was to show repeated scenes of violent Chinese torture on Tibetans. But the film limits all that to the bare minimum and lets the film have a Tibetan ideology, a buddhist one where it purposefully abandons all form of such scenes that make it haunting towards the end. But does it satisfy completely, well the answer is no as I simply had a similar feeling after Dances with wolves. Pitt plays a compelling character and performs effectively, but his accent is sometimes irritating. David Thewlis also gives one of his better performances. However, some things about the film are too American in the way in which it simply ignores Harrer's Nazi roots, he supported Germany when he left for the mountains and he never said that he is an Austrian not a German to any soldiers (as shown in the film) nor does he ever show any reluctance in accepting Nazi flag before leaving because these incidents are described as I just said in his memoirs. The imagery and cinematography are fantastic.