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Tonight, esrblog and I went with shakati and pmat to see Ridley Scott's take on Robin Hood, starring Cate Blanchett and Russell Crowe.

My feelings about the movie are very ambivalent. That's because for every thing I really liked about the movie, there was at least one thing that I found to be offputting, out-of-place, or just plain stupid. Because so many of the things that I liked--as well as the things that drove me crazy--require giving spoilers, I have to put most of this review under an LJ cut.

( Heavy-duty spoilers ahead! )

Usually, when I find myself spending more time during a movie thinking about the music, or about any other detail instead of being swept up in the story, I conclude that the moviemakers have done something badly wrong. That kind of deconstruction, unfortunately, describes what I found myself doing during "Robin Hood".

That may not mean that you shouldn't see this film. On the contrary, many people (especially people who haven't studied European medieval history) may well enjoy it. But overall the movie seemed to me to be too much like an attempt to make an Errol Flynn type of movie in 2010--without attempting to use anything we've learned about history, or about the making of movies set in the historical past, since Errol Flynn played Robin in 1938. That seems wrong to me.