Well to break this long absence from this blog I have decided to post some content of mine. This is a review I just wrote about Luther. I liked the film, but here's my better worded comments. This review is a work in progress, so any advice on how I can make it better would be great.
Luther is a film more about events than characters, and as an emotional bridge to the drama of events 500 years past it works. Any work of historical fiction, written or watched, lives or dies based on its ability to connect the audience to a time that they have no natural way to relate to. Normally, this connection is made through making a character intimate. Through taking an obscure mover in history and making her almost a part of the present, a person that comes up along side you on the Interstate in her car, and then moves on to wherever she’s going.
Why do we like to watch Gladiator or Braveheart, to read the newest sea-faring yarns of Patrick O’brian? Because, as they make these men of the past understandable to us today, so they allow us to in turn inhabit their pasts. Without a connection of personalities and past, how does Luther work? Luther does something quite different, yet fundamentally similar.
When you watch Luther, you see a story of one man, an underdog, and relative commoner, elevated through education, challenge the authority and corruption of the elite for the benefit of all Europeans. As you may have guessed, Luther is the story of Martin Luther, instigator of the Protestant Reformation in Western Europe. As someone living today as a benefactor of the Protestant tradition, I felt very much involved with the outcome of the film.
Luther at its best tells you the importance of the events transpiring before you, Protestant or Catholic, the actions of this man wear critically important to the freedom and liberty you now enjoy today. As a movie, it becomes good, insofar as it can convince you to become emotionally involved in the unfolding drama, hoping that Luther will succeed in his reforms despite impossible odds, because you can sense that it is so important that he does.
While Luther does this beautifully, I wanted more. I never saw why the power of the pure story, had to come at the cost of understanding Luther more as the man he was. Through much of the movie, the motivations to his actions remained a complete enigma. At one point, as he was walking by idyllic green fields, with a beautiful girl in two, Luther reveals, “I’m so miserable I can barely sleep at night.” Is there any indication in that Luther is in these depths of despair? Not really. Would this movie be better if there had? Most definitely.