Very good

Rating: 9/10 (28 February 2005)

Gangs of New York... where to start? The film is good in a sense I didn't expect. I was thinking... Leonardo DiCaprio, big-budget history piece, full of inaccuracies. In fact, the entire film walks and moves like a ghost story. The images are so powerful, and always remain true to very feel of the world. It feels like we aren't watching a film, we're watching lives.
That's the truth of why this film affected me. Not only was it extraordinarily well-made (using modern hints to imply the brewing war) but there was a deep sorrow to it. The tribal battles of ancient warring nations, in a roiling furnace of tradition and furor, were overtaken by the New World. That's what makes it so terrible--- it isn't that so many men and women lost their lives to self-made war; it's that they are totally forgotten. The gangs of New York were overtaken by the city; lost to the corruption they created. As Amsterdam says in the end of the film: "It's like no one will ever know we were ever here." The real tragedy is shown in the final sequence... the gravestones fall over and, with years, the truth is made clear: no one cares about the "hands that built America", or what those hands broke creating.
That's the deeper meaning. The ancient feud of rival tribes is swallowed up by the progression of the era. Bill the Butcher and Amsterdam can war with each other all they want... but they lived and died in the past, the land they worked so hard to make their own taken up by the cops and professional fire departments and city sanitation services.
I think that--- and the amazing use of image and music--- is what really got me. Nine out of ten. (It would be ten straight, if there hadn't been so much bare breasts in the film. That bugged me.) Definitely see it!