The Legend of Tomiris (2019) by Akan Satayev

Director: Akan Satayev

Year: 2019

Country: Kazakhstan

Alternate Titles: Tomiris

Genre: Action/Period

Plot:

After being abandoned when her father dies in battle, a female warrior strikes a friendship with a tribe of Amazonian warriors and heads off into battle with them in order to thwart a ruthless tyrant looking to take control of the lands around them for his own nefarious purposes, eventually forcing her into a decisive battle for her fate.

Review:

There wasn’t much to like about this one. The main thing with it is the complete lack of anything original in the storyline which may have been factually accurate to the real-life person but just feels like it’s going through the motions of every historical figure’s journey. The cliched death of her father which starts everything off is nothing new or unique, and the quest to her birthright being reclaimed in bloody fashion by vanquishing the big bad of the area feels more like checking off lists in every type of genre film. Moreover, the endless clichés run throughout here are just endlessly repetitive which allows this to feel every bit it’s gargantuan running time which had no reason to be.

The other issue here is the fact that this overlong pace brings up some dd structural flaws within the film. The repeating of the father’s death at the early stage of the film and the eventual series of flashbacks and montages showing the various training sequences and battles preparing her for battle just drag the pace down considerably. Meanwhile, the films’ seemingly climactic moment with her ascent to power and uniting the various forces around her happens at the halfway point so there’s still a considerable amount of running time left which makes everything not only feel even more dragged out but emotionally hollow with the extended fighting to come after that point has occurred. Although the battle scenes themselves come off ith a sense of scope and scale that effectively makes a grand scale possible, it’s not enough to save this one.

Overview: */5

A wholly problematic and overlong epic that doesn’t have much going on for it, there’s some okay material here but by and large, there’s very little to like here with all sorts of issues holding this one down. It’s really only worth a look for those curious about the country’s cinematic output, but anyone else should avoid extreme caution.