This is a great example of just because something is impressive, doesn’t necessarily make it great. Don’t get me wrong I thought this was good, albeit a little longer than it needed to be, but still good. The craft on this film is so grand and well done, especially the cinematography, wardrobe, and production design. This is especially the case with the first half of the film in the Forbidden City. I don’t know how Bertolucci was granted such access to these places, but power to him. John Lone was also really good in this. The central theme of examining what it is like to be an emperor and what the word even really means is great, but the film gets bogged down by following so much of Puyi’s life. I also don’t know how I feel about this being shot in English as opposed to Mandarin. I don’t know much about the Rape of Nanjing and it’s something that I wish they could have gone into more as it is really important to the outcome of Puyi’s choices. In thinking about the Academy Awards for a second, the grand scale and amount of work that needs to go into making a film like this always seems to enamor voters. FATAL ATTRACTION, BROADCAST NEWS, and MOONSTRUCK are all better films, but they aren’t on as large of a scale as this one is. It is something I think we moved past as cinephiles since films such have AVATAR and THE REVENANT have lost the big award to something smaller like THE HURT LOCKER and SPOTLIGHT.
