What Happens When Men try to play God

Rating: 7/10 (15 September 2013)

I originally thought that this was a movie about Jesus, but it turned out that it was based on a Rudyard Kipling novel, which is just as good. Kipling is well known as the author of The Jungle Story (which I have not read) but he wrote many other books, this being one of them. Kipling grew up in India, where most of his books are based, and worked there as a journalist. Kipling appears at the beginning and the end of this movie, which brings some legitimacy to the story.
The story is about two British Army sergeants who decide to cross the Hindu Kush and conquer Afghanistan. They meet up with Kipling at the beginning and their interaction with him demonstrate them as being quite sly and underhanded. This underhandedness is what they take over the mountains in Afghanistan however there is a lot of luck involved as well. Firstly they are saved in the Hindu Kush by an avalanche that enables them to continue on their journey. When they arrive at the first city they meet up with an Indian guide who is able to act as a translator, and when they are taken to the holy city, the priest finds a symbol on one of them that corresponds to a symbol carved on one of their stones.
However, it is very clear that this movie is going to end badly for both of them. When one of them survives an arrow shot (namely because it hits a leather strap) they believe that he is a god and worship him as such. However, there is a catch. It quickly becomes clear that while he is a god (the son of Secunda, the name of Alexander the Great, who promised that his son will return to rule them) there are limits to his power, and the priesthood make this clear. Everything comes undone when he decides that he wants to marry one of the locals (a girl named Roxanne, after Alexander's love interest). Despite all of his rhetoric he is unable to convince the natives that it is his right to marry, and when Roxanne bites him, it becomes clear that he is not a god, and is thus executed. His companion manages to escape, and this is how the tale is returned to Kipling.
I guess this story is a tragedy of those who go to seek power and in finding it, are encompassed by it. To us westerner's a king is a mortal (and was so when the book was written in the late 19th Century), but to the natives, he was a god. There is no playing god, especially around non-European cultures. Captain Cook found that out the hard way when he returned to Tahiti only to be killed by the people that originally worshiped him. The same happened here when he decided that he would overturn the natives' tradition and attempt to marry. It wasn't going to happen, and no amount of rhetoric is going to change that. As the bible says, 'what does it profit a man to gain the whole world only to lose his soul'.