An average movie

A couple of weeks ago, I saw 'Sa majesté Minor', probably Jean-Jacques Annaud's weakest movie so far but I was still eager to check his next directing effort. Fortunately, it was much better. It was again quite an obscure feature which was barely noticed when it was released but, this time, he chose a story which was at least quite fascinating to behold. Indeed, it deals with the history of some middle-east countries just when oil was discovered, an event that would change this part of the world forever. In the middle of this historical event, you have an Emir, played by Antonio Banderas, who thinks that they should take advantage of this new wealth to get rich but also to improve the way of life of his subjects and, on the other side, you have a sultan, played by Mark Strong, who believes that they shouldn't seek this unholy black gold and remain faithful to their traditional way of life. The fact is that none of these 2 men was really evil or good and both their point of view made sense which was eventually very interesting. So, the ingredients were all there to make a great movie but, unfortunately, the mix didn't completely work. Indeed, they had a bunch of sons and a daughter, some of them linked to both families and it turned the whole thing into a soap which was too bad. Also, the quest of the main character was also rather murky and they tried to turn the movie into a new 'Lawrence of Arabia' but it was rather a failure. To conclude, even though it wasn’t really great, I still believe that there was something quite spellbinding about this story and it is definitely worth a look.

6/10