Great acting, but not moving

Rating: 7/10 (20 February 2008)

I will be very quick and only confirm that: 1) Daniel Day Lewis gives an extraordinary performance, he fully deserves an Oscar. 2) the music score is brilliant in the sense that it perfectly highlights and accompany the movie in its development, helping to create a continuous tension throughout. (although by itself it would be quite a weird listening experience). 3) the main weakness of this movie is (and possibly that was a precise strategy) that it it is not involving the audience feelings. Even in the most desperate moments (= the abandoning of his son / the abandoning of his father), the main character's solitude and desperation are portrayed in a very dry and cold way, the audience (at least me) is not moved. 4) The plot has major holes which remain unexplained. 5) the character of the young priest does not show signs of becoming old later in the movie, when everyone else does. 6) This movie has been compared to Kubrick's 2001 Space Odissey, or to Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West for its epic, but such comparisons are nonsense. Those two movies rank among the masterpieces. This is a good movie, time will tell.