Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Fresh and Exciting

How wonderful it is to see this fine actress carry a film and carry it so beautifully.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

The most just rating is a comparison to previous iterations, foremost on my mind the book, and by this metric the film performs poorly.I don't find fault with the actors, so much as the writers, and to a lessor extent the director.Thw film opens with a parallelism between sport and war, cutting down on the backstory of the main character and his military lineage and the expectations of his father, to build a sense of camaraderie, achieving one admirably, but no doubt erring somewhat in the sacrifice of the proper measure of Victorian propriety. I thought it frankly influenced by the Gilbert and Sullivan scene of Chariots of Fire, which though also an Empire era film, takes place in a different time period.And personally, I think Kate Hudson is ravishing here.Where the film really starts to fall apart, is when they leave England. Quite frankly, this film is in a higher taxon than mere political correctness. It is a white guilt film, joining such others like the recent Green Hornet and Lone Ranger films, where a perfectly good hero is ruined and made to play second fiddle to whatever minority character can be found, whether or not that character had really been done any injustice.The good whites must establish their bona fides by preventing their evil brethren from hurting or impugning the other races, it seems. The bad ones, well, we don't care what happens to them, do we?The photography is not exactly Lawrence of Arabia but pretty uninspired. One scene has the Mahdi's forces rise up from their hiding places underneath the sand, where they would have been cooking quite well. I saw this same scene more or less in the Costner Robin Hood film, in temperate England where it made more sense.There are many continuity errors.The main character seems to bumble from one scene to another, saved each time by his more heavily pigmented and thus more capable friend. Not an Arab, as in the book, but a black to more properly service the feelings of white guilt. He is tied to a post and whipped like a slave by an evil white, in one seemingly meant to be cathartic scene.Our new main character, spends a lot of time shirtless to show off his black skin and impressive muscles, but let us not forget this is an equatorial sun, and no man in his right mind would be caught shirtless.Of course, all this is really forgetting that it was the Arabs who were the slavers and the British who fought them (under Christain influence, no less!) to destroy the slave trade, as much as was practical, for one can still find slaves today in many parts of the world.The one likable British soldier, with one or two good scenes, is the blind man, a character performed admirably. But, alas, they leave out the small homage to the blind traveler (a real life character who traveled thousands of miles, sightlessly, on his own) that was in the much superior book.If one wants to see a movie version, the '39 film is a good adaptation.

Not because The Four Feathers is a favorite from childhood that wears very well but because, after recording from TMC and archiving on a disc, I discovered I had a 115 minute movie, not the 75 or 90 minute versions either listed on sites like IMDb or for sale from, well, everyone.Initially I thought that there was something wrong with the recording but, after a couple of hours looking for intermissions, repeated scenes or recording breaks it turned out this was the entire movie and where TMC got it is a wonderful mystery. TMC itself lists it as a 90 minute movie and there was no mention of having discovered this version either on-site or during the presentation.Whatever - I'm just glad they did because those extra 25 minutes add to the film tremendously and fill in a lot of holes that I'd noticed, even as a kid, in the 90 minute version. As much as I'd enjoyed it, The Four Feathers always seemed truncated in that version but I'd always blamed the local stations for chopping it up. Now I know better.This version does start slow, overdoing the set-up, but that is a very, very minor flaw. Once it takes off (a poor term for any British movie) it become a true marvel of film making. The pace is very much British, measured like a metronome set at 2/4 lentando, but that pacing actually adds to the impact of each scene, especially the action scenes, which seemed discordant in the 'original', but now have the length to stand on their own as mini codas instead of irritating diversions.Ironically, those extra 25 minutes speed the viewing by eliminating the 'stops' (those breaks when one scene doesn't quite flow from another, pushing you off the screen) and restoring the seamless flow of the movie.So, thanks TMC, wherever you found this, for a very welcome surprise.Update 12-16-13Just noticed that IMDb has me reviewing the 2002 version. Never saw it; this review is for the 1939 version.

admirable story about values. a lesson about courage, sacrifice and friendship. powerful, subtle, impressive. an old fashion film. and an extraordinary work. it is difficult to give a verdict. sure, war, romance, historical slices are ingredients for a nice cocktail. but The Four Feathers is a little more. and this fact is essential. Heath Ledger makes a great role. entire art of nuances, entire force of performance are bricks for an extraordinary character. the truth as heart of personal battle, the action scenes, the dialogs - each - part of authentic jewel. so, it is not a film for descriptions or critics. only source of impressions.

There's a lot of stunning imagery in this pic, but the director's aim here is to educate the public on the political realities of empire building; foreign and domestic. The director is not sympathetic to the British in any way, and it shows in this film.We have some superb cinematography for an historic epic focusing on four disparate comrades of "Her Majesties Army". But note, we don't come to sympathize with any of them. We don't come to care for any of them. We don't get attached to a single protagonist. One wonders why that is.It's because we're truly looking at a historical drama that asks us to follow the characters from A to B to C, but only from the vantage of a distant viewer, and as audience members engaged in the emotional outcome of the drama, we're left high and dry in this regard. This is a very objectifying work. We see the harsh realities of colonial warfare, but there's no sense of wanting or needing some or any of the characters to live. We're almost looking at an anti-British film. Something that comes near to being pro-Islam, but is more anti-colonial in its stance than a prostelizatizn of some other political thought.But, does that make it a bad film? No, not really. I did like watching it for the visuals, but I did feel somewhat empty. On my first viewing I thought and wondered how anyone could not like this picture, because I thought there was a heartfelt attempt to show the plight of everyone. And that's the irony of it all. Because the film is so thorough in its depiction of hardship, you never get a sense of where to position your own emotional investment as per my previous paragraph.As a stand alone film I think it's okay, but nothing to write home about in terms of being a fully realized drama. The acting is is actually quite good, though overstated at times. The late Heath Ledger tries to infuse the sublime in his thesping as he takes on the dual persona of a young officer who's scared to go to war, but later tears down his cowardice after his trials in the Sudan.Something that might've helped this film would have been for the characters to have realized who and where they were; i.e. what they were doing (to channel a little Yoda here). Yet again, all we see is what one might call the emotional plot. The actions and the reactions of the characters. We never truly get to look into their hearts.Mores the pity.Rent it for a night's viewing. The actual story is pretty decent, and worth seeing because of some very impressive cinematography. But, don't be surprised if you feel a little empty at the end of it.