Should be seen at least once

Rating: 8/10 (17 March 2019)

This week I watched the adventure-bio-drama Lawrence of Arabia (1962). The logline reads "The story of T.E. Lawrence, the English officer who successfully united and led the diverse, often warring, Arab tribes during World War I in order to fight the Turks." I would have to say that the part of this movie I find the most interesting is that it is based on a true story. I always find these kinds of movies to be the most intriguing. I think that this provides a very powerful takeaway regarding the power of will and belief. Most of the movie was very professionally made. It was shot in a Cinemascope aspect ratio and 4-track to 6-track sound mixing, there were also some surprisingly rudimentary facets of productions. For example, many of the night time scenes were pulled off in some manner of early day-for-night technique via film-processing-technique. The special effects, particularly, the blood didn't seem to be professionally colored. The blood was too bright red and in some scenes not very believable. Despite the oddities in production, the casting was brilliant. Comparing O'Toole to the original photo of T.E. Lawrence if brilliant. There is much to be said about good casting decisions here. Conversely, being a different era, the dialogue was a little hard to follow in some parts. So much so that I had to turn on closed captions to really understand what was being said. I do wish that both the plot and the character were a little clearer. To be honest, I had a hard time following the action of the story or why Lawrence would make the decisions that he did or behave in certain ways. Sometimes it got a little muddy. I think this film is also a good example of how there are examples of white supremacy within old Hollywood. In this film it is somewhat glaring, but this can be really eye-opening too. Also, as is the nature of old-time films, the scenes dragged on for excessive amounts of time. Due to the length of this film, I can't say that I'd watch it again, but I do recommend it for educational purposes.