A miracle of a film! The true definition of an epic

Rating: 9/10 (5 January 2017)

I am not one of the guys who can sit and watch a 3 hrs epic film just like that. I have to be in a proper mood and have to be willing to get on a journey or an adventure, if you will, to another place and time. Happily, the conditions were right for me to watch an epic and I did watch Lawrence. A lot of things were intriguing about that film: The amazing cinematography, the framing of shots, the impeccable crowd control, and, you know, all the technical stuff. Although not as good as Lawrence's, these qualities are present in other epics as well. What really drew me into the film was T.E Lawrence's character in the film. Usually in epics, the characters take a back seat for the sake of the action or events. But here we see this intimate personal story of a man who, for some reason, challenges and tests himself: Burning his hand with the matchstick, standing in front of a man firing bullets towards him and almost killing him, and constantly going to dangerous battles with the Arabs. For what? He's not doing it for his country and most probably not for the Arabs. He is trying to prove something to himself about himself. He is a deeply self-destructive character and to have such small exquisite story of a man within the epic canvas of the wars and the desert is just extraordinary. I can't believe that Sam Spiegel really took a chance on this madly genius (and very risky) film. I give credit to him, to Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson for the amazing screenplay, to the terrific Peter O Toole and Omar Sharif and , of course, to the man himself, one of cinema's greatest filmmaking artists, Mr. David Lean.