A revelation in old school epic film making

Rating: 10/10 (9 October 2004)

Although I'd seen LoA on TV many, many years ago, I finally sat down with the Restored Director's Cut DVD and it was frankly a revelation to see how they used to make epic movies before the days of CGI and special effects. Strange to think that this film was made more than 40 years ago and yet it still towers over a lot of much more technologically advanced films that have come out in the last 5-6 years since 'The Matrix' supposedly raised the bar on film making.
In some ways LoA has lots in common with modern epics like Lord of the Rings (particularly the first half with the long journey to Aqaba), but when you consider that everything in LoA was filmed 'live' so to speak (well apart from the shoot of the sun in the desert, but that was because the real sun kept burning the celluloid film in the camera) then you begin to appreciate the mastery that went into making this film, which must count as David Lean's masterpiece imho.
In todays world, where we've seen developments like Weta Digital's Massive software(for creating huge CG armies), John Gaeta's Bullet Time, or Sky Captain with its CG Sir Laurence Olivier avatar, etc. the idea that Lean went into the desert to shoot the mirage scene 'as is' or the charge into Aqaba with real horses and riders, etc is just amazing. (You also get a similar sense of this old school film making in Sergio Leone's 'The Good the Bad and the Ugly' when you hear how Eli Wallach was very nearly decapitated while filming one scene near a railway line.)
Easily scores 10 out of 10 just for the sheer audacity of the film-making process.