An interesting and very beautiful film, a real historical drama, as it should be. Really a work, not some stinking blockbuster or fantasy. You can praise everything – a great plot, a lot of colorful characters (each revealed, no one deprived), morality, the work of everyone who recreated these ancient landscapes, the atmosphere of the era. Large timekeeping, almost 2 times more than the standard, I have always appreciated this.
However, there are shortcomings.
- The hero, having made an autopsy of a person for the first time, talks about the inner structure, about the heart, as if it were something completely unprecedented. The authors forgot that people from the Middle Ages constantly dealt with the butchering of animals. Hearts, lungs, livers, etc., they saw on their table. Human organs differ little from all this, so the character could not talk about it as the discovery of a new universe.
- The film is kind of a film adaptation of the book, but as usual, the whole book is twisted there. I understand when content is changed in order to reduce or increase accents, but all these changes are absolutely not justified. When someone has to die like this, they die differently or someone else dies instead. Characters go wrong, they do wrong. Why?
- A lot of historical mistakes. Cataracts are not treated, at least not so. The story of Aladdin is not included in 1001 Nights and appeared much later. The Shah was not a shah, but an emir, and he fought the wrong ones and died the wrong way. Avicenna did not poison himself, but died of stomach disease. Not those clothes, armor, the Tower at the end is shown a century and a half before its construction, etc. Read more on Wikipedia. The average viewer does not know or notice this, but the fact is that we now live in an era of publicly available information, any fact can be verified in seconds without getting out of the chair. Writers and directors would have to test them in the same way, but somehow decide not to.