Moustroll Good movie but grossly overrated

Bergorks If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

Aneesa Wardle The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Kien Navarro Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Andres-Camara The three eternal hours of this movie are over. I still do not know what he wants to tell me. More than anything because it does not have a common thread, nor does it go anywhere. Everything is assembled without a reason.It is an incredible production. A huge stage But I do not know what counts?We could say that the actors are great, the problem is that apart from seeing completely crazy characters, that if they do it superbly, I do not know what they are performing, so I do not know if it's right or wrong.He has a very good photograph, if we knew what he wants to tell us. It's very pretty, but I do not know how it helps.The use of sequence plans tires me, without a reason. The camera goes from one side to another, but I do not know what it is following. I do not know why the actors look at the camera so many times.It's been a shame, to lose so much time in seeing this

popcorninhell Based on a novel by Arkadiy Strugatskiy, Hard to Be a God, is an incredibly radical sci-fi film that stretches the meaning of all possible descriptors. This film is not for contemporary popular audiences. This film's audience (if you could say it has one) are the squirrelly, anti-social filmophiles that are too deep down the rabbit hole to be brought back. They're the people who have spent half their lives in darkened rooms and use film as a reference point for life itself. In other words, it a movie just for me.Knowing Hard to Be a God's production history automatically creates a modicum of goodwill towards the film. Director Aleksey German shot the film over six years and took another seven years to edit it before succumbing to heart failure at the age of 73. Yet even before his last film, his career is littered with long-gestating movies that in some cases were put on hold for years due to Soviet censorship. While the USSR ultimately crumbled 27 years ago, German's insistence in making movies his way is still met with accusations of impenetrability and art cinema navel-gazing.Hard to Be a God's narrative is not a concern here but for the sake of cogency I'll summarize. Our protagonist Don Rumata (Yarmolnik) is a human, one of many living on another planet stuck in the middle ages. It's never made clear if he's there to help the planet's fledgling culture but what is clear is everyone seems to have a fundamental distrust of intellectuals and a hatred towards science. Perhaps because of this, Rumata has assimilated himself as a noble with God-like powers and thus is feared by all.These God-like powers by the way include having the ability to swat spears away from his face to the gasping amazement of dim-witted centuries. It appears that Rumata has given up on logic long ago choosing instead to abuse his most loyal subjects in an attempt to make them understands the basic truths about germs, economics and whether or not fish like milk. Yet to designate Rumata a classic anti-hero would be far too simplistic. He, like the rest of the idiots populating the screen is wholly unlikable but in a drastically different way.Hard to Be a God, to put it succinctly is two parts Andrei Tarkovsky, one part Terry Gilliam and a tiny bit of Idiocracy (2006); though summarizing German's mis en scene through text is completely impossible. His images are so textured, so grotesque and so bizarre that it is unlike anything I have ever seen let alone anything I can describe. World-building seems to be German's biggest strength. We not only see the chaos happening around the characters, we feel the coarse mud, smell the putrid bile and rotting corpses and taste the blood and sinew on the half cooked chicken they consume.If one were to point to a glaring problem with the film it's that at nearly three hours, the film is simply too long to endure more than once. Scenes of little consequence could have easily been cut to make way for a tighter story and an ending that sticks the landing with devastating aplomb. However, say what you will about the film's leisurely pace, the constant injection of intense medieval grotesqueness supplies the film's audience with enough imagery to fill several nightmares.While illustrating the problems of a faraway planet, Hard to Be a God is a damning condemnation of humanities struggle with its own ignorance. While certainly not for everyone, the film's warped, layered and visceral vision of medieval life is rivaled only by Marketa Lazarova (1967). Hard to Be a God is a must-watch contemporary classic whose reputation will only grow in the years to come. If you're on its wavelength, I recommend you check it out.

broggoethe OK, I have finally found it! After watching hundreds and hundreds of movies over the past few years, I am pretty sure I have just seen the worst movie ever made in the history of man. God bless the reviewers that saw something socially redeemable in this film, I know everybody is different but it was just terrible, OMG. Black and white, mud everywhere, rain, spitting, why were they looking into the camera? Seriously, this movie was BAD!!!! Plus, it was super long! If you didn't read about the plot on some web site there is NO WAY you would know what it was about...NO WAY! Believe me, you will thank me for checking spoiler alert, that way you wont waste your time. Think of the worst movie you have ever seen, this movie makes your worst movie look like Ben Hur.

iCronic 5,5/10There is a basic plot description in the beginning but it is not always clear which character is which and what they are specifically doing. I read the Wikipedia Plot description afterwards and it makes it more understandable. The Dialogue is vague, often times outside the frame, since other people are constantly putting their face or other objects infront of the camera. Also some voices are clearly edited in, during post production. Hard to be a god gets repetitive after a while because the scenery stays the same and the bizarre actions go on for 3 hours.  I haven't seen anyone mention the horrible photoshopped face on the corpse at the end of the film, seemed like a budget thing.  With all that being said, the detailed visuals alone make it worth to watch. It is one of the most unique films I've seen. There isn't a film filthier than this