Servants of God

Yes, I'm going to talk about Servants of God. Most of you who are reading this will probably be familiar with this particular project, it was my final script for my Degree course, roughly equivilent to a dissertation in weight of marks. At least that's what we'd like to believe.

I've always been fascinated by history and how it got us to where we are now. I mean, if you look at the world a thousand years ago, doesn't it just seem so alien and distant? How did anyone think the way they did back then? The Crusades are a prime example of how much and little things have changed.

In 1095, Pope Urban II declared the First Crusade and an army from all across Europe was gathered and set out across the Middle East to lay siege to a city that most of them had only heard of in the same breath as Adam and Eve. People were that dedicated that they were willing to give up their entire lives and take the Crusade, to journey across (what was then) the known world and attack a group of people that they had never met before, whose only crime was to have a different name for the same God.

In 1191, after the Great Sultan Salah Al-Din retook the city of Jerusalem from the Christian occupiers, King Richard the Lionheart launched the Third Crusade, an attempt to reclaim Jerusalem for Christianity. He spent seven months in the desert and ultimately left without succeeding in his objective. It was my objective to give an overview of those seven months within one hundred and twenty pages of script and then hand it in. I wrote four complete drafts and four half drafts, equalling about seven hundred pages.

The very last draft was an almost complete rewrite that was done within a single 24-hour period. I was very proud of how it came out in the end, following a young mercenary crossbowman who followed Richard's campaign and gradually found that the reason people came all this way to die, was because they wanted something to live for. A bit sappy, but it worked. And he was scottish, which helps. In the end, I had to cut a lot of characters, but kept in all the major battles and hope I kept in the spirit of the time.

I got a 63%, which is a 2:1. Not bad.

THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN:
THE SECRET OF THE UNICORN

Well, you know what, this just wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. I had many, many terrible expectations and this managed to beat just about all of them. For parts, it kind of felt like Steven Spielberg trying to apologise for that God-Awful 4th Indiana Jones movie by having something of a rip-roaring adventure with plenty of action, swashbuckling and humour.

I'd say that the voice cast was good, but it was very confusing. Jamie Bell was obviously Tintin, but I was amazed to find that Captain Haddock was played by Andy Serkis, who genuinely managed to put on the best Gerard Butler impression I've ever heard. Likewise I'd thought that Sakharine was voiced by Richard E Grant or someone equally aristocratic. Nope, Daniel Craig.

That being said, it was clearly obvious which roles Pegg and Frost were down for from the start.

I'll say that I quite enjoyed ol' Tintin and I do hope that Peter Jackson follows up on his promise to make a second, after Spielberg's first outing in the series. If there was one massive area of pain to watch, it was the airplane sequence, which didn't so much stretch my suspension of disbelief as it did donkey punch it and leave it out in the road, weeping.

Not entirely sure that the empty fuel tank of a propeller plane can be fuelled by the beer-soaked breath of an alcoholic Sea Captain, but never mind, eh? Oddly, I found that Snowy didn't test my limits of disbelief, but the flooding/floating building sequence near the end almost got there. It was a little too kid-friendly (see my comments on Sammy's Adventures for that), but it still worked.

In a few minutes:
THE GREATEST MOVIE EVER SOLD