The most important thing you need to know about Mongol before seeing it is that it is the first part of a projected trilogy about the life of Genghis Khan. Think of it as The Youth of Khan, and bear in mind that it’s only going to take you about a third of the way through his history. The legendary Mongol leader, who united a variety of loosely related but generally feuding tribes into an army that conquered the largest contiguous empire in history, is certainly ripe fodder for an epic film (and hopefully one that will erase the memory of John Wayne as GK in the monumentally awful The Conqueror). Technically a film from Kazakhstan (at least as far as the Oscar folk are concerned, who nominated it for best Foreign Language Film earlier this year) but really a Russian production, this grand-scaled movie is worth seeing simply for the spectacular scenery of the vast Mongolian landscapes, an area too remote for tourists and therefore one of the most unspoiled places on earth. (Hollywood could film National Lampoon’s Asian Vacation here and it would be worth seeing, though thank god that will never happen.) If scenery alone isn’t good enough for you, there are massive battle sequences between horse-mounted armies and even a romantic thread involving the young leader, born Temudgin, and his wife, whom he meets at the age of nine. What it lacks is a historical-political context. We get at best only the most general idea of the relations between various tribes and nations, or of what Temudgin does to assemble his army. There are moments when it resembles last year’s 300, with Temudgin making proclamations about the nature of his people and vowing that “Mongols need laws. I will make them obey, even if I have to kill half of them.” Hopefully veteran writer-director Sergei Bodrov (Prisoner of the Mountains, also an Oscar nominee) was just trying to get our attention in the first part of his trilogy and plans to bring more depth to his subject when exploring Khan’s later years in the next two films.

—m. faust