The Legend of Suriyothai (2001)

I rented this movie because I had never seen a movie set in medieval Siam (Thailand). I found the movie fascinating; the culture, the costumes, the history held me. Some of the politics went over my head on the first viewing, and being a westerner who uses things like hair and eye color to sort characters apart, it was at first difficult to tell who was who. However, I am definitely going to watch it again.Some reviews have said the acting is wooden. Some of it is, however allow for cultural differences. Also most royalty throughout history and in most countries are trained to be very self-controlled. You have to watch for clues. But how can some reviewers say the main character does nothing? In the very first minutes, Suriyothai is complaining about rules, she then goes off and talks to a man by herself(!) risking punishment. When asked to marry a man she does not love, she runs away and only her sense of duty to the people brings her back. We see her being VERY knowledgeable about court polities and the necessities of power. Later she organizes a rebellion, then rides off to battle and throws herself between the fighting kings to save her husband.I found it a very interesting movie that is well worth watching: besides how can you not love a movie where the king yells "Arm the elephants!"

I had no idea what this movie was but had seen it on the satellite schedule several times before the occasion on which I finally watched it. This is definitely another on the list of foreign-language films that are much better than most of Hollywood's output.If you can appreciate movies that are filmed in a language you don't understand, I'd highly recommend this. As with films like Queen Margot and the recent Chinese movies from Crouching Tiger to Hero and House of Flying Daggers, I felt like I understood directly most of the time. The acting, direction, and pace of the subtitles were so well done that I was pretty much completely drawn into the movie and oblivious to the fact that I was reading anything.Being completely uneducated on Thai history, it was difficult the first time I was watching to keep track of who was who. I felt like this added to the experience of watching this movie rather than detract from it, however, because the viewer is meant to feel conflicted sympathies.Suriyothai is just a gorgeous movie. Everything about it is so artful that you want to dive into it down to tasting the foods. I totally recommend it if you want an epic movie you've never heard of that is easily on top of Hollywood standards for quality. If this were an American movie, the budget probably would have been at least 200 million or so. It's just fantastic.

I had heard a lot about this movie and I rented the Coppola version. While the costumes and sets were impressive, and the battle scenes were alright, in general I didn't like it. The acting seemed really wooden (I realize they're royalty, but it still seemed forced), the dialogue was cheesy. The emotions seemed to come out of nowhere - all of a sudden, people were in love, or angry, or what have you. It seemed like they were trying to tell us this was an amazing story, rather than making us feel that it was. And frankly, I didn't think it was that impressive - the ending seemed kind of pointless and forced to me, even though it's a true story.

The people on this site that complained about this movie being boring, must have seen an entirely different movie, on the contrary, I found it to be an exciting, action packed and culturally enlightening film. It isnt perfect, but It is defintely worth the time and money I spent on the VCD. To the uninformed I saw the original Thai cut of this film esp. when I heard that Francis Ford Coppola was going to release a shorter version of it, because he in all his benevolent wisdom knows better than the director how the picture needed to be edited. Mr Coppola all I want to ask is how come you didnt get rights to release all five hours of footage that was shot, instead of taking out scenes and replacing it with others? Somebody in Thailand should take 40 minutes out of Apocalypse Now and take out entire scenes and replace them with scenes from the additional 3 hours of footage that FFC shot for the movie.All the critics of this movie, esp those who feel it was too long need to think and consider that maybe the reason why: it jumps around in the story, there seems to be little character development, and some of the dialogue seems choppy might be because it was orignally intended after theater release to be shown on Thai television as a 2 part miniseries. My personal opinion is I dont think the film was long enough and in spite of that and the other weak points I mentioned I seldom found it boring. Great care and detail obviously went into period costumes and sets and the scope of this film is tremendous, especially in the intricate battle scenes, which were on par with many of the Hollywood spectacles. I also found a rare peek into Thai culture extremely fasinating, since it so seldom that we get an accurate glimpse of Asian cultures aside from the Japanese and Chinese cultures, and even though those protrayals usually condescending and jingoistic. Many of the same people who complain about this movie had no problem going to see long movies like Dances with Wolves or Braveheart, which too were highly entertaing if historical inaccurate films. I found that even though the dialogue in the final scene was a bit hokey, that it still packed an emotional wallop even knowing the Queen Suriyothai is going to die, not a spoiler folks, because the film opens with her death, there is just something about the sacrifice of one's life for something greater than yourself which is very dramatic and inspiring.The films major weakness is that even though the film is about her, it spends a lot of time on a lot of secondary characters most of which are fairly interesting, I wanted to see more of what made her tick. The whole thing works inspite of this weaknesses. If you like larger than life characters, well choreographed and bloody battle sequences, and some drama and intrigue then you will love this film.