"Great educational piece. Rises to very artful heights in places, (particularly in the African children scenes). Peppered with snappy action. Never sinks below the level of a decent biopic.
Great acting. Very good direction. Great indigenous music. Great moral themes related to nonviolence, patience, loving and forgiving your enemies, which are the real triumphs of the story.
On the negative side, the movie, like Nelson's life, sells the Trojan Horse of democracy, which any astute political scholar knows is: "9 wolves and 1 sheep deciding what to have for dinner."
The main weakness in the film is its 20-25 minutes overlong cut.
This story needs to be brought in in under 2 hours.
To go over 2 hours, you need to have a Schindler's List level of visual artfulness or a Braveheart-level of spectacle.
The cut and dramatic flow are also sometimes a bit choppy.
Everything in the movie works but it needed to be tightened and chained together, with the least-effective 15% sloughed off to a deleted scenes archive." GENIE SAYS:
Good 7.7
βCut long and a bit overly graphic in sex, violence, and profanity for schoolroom use. The profanity is infrequent but it covers the full range of words you don't want your child to hear. Other than that, the film is exceptionally educational and exposes themes of paramount importance, for instance: the primacy of peace, calm, patience, self-control, forgiveness, and loving your enemies in any conflict.β
