Review: Jodhaa Akbar

After loving Om Shanti Om, I asked a friend of mine about some good bollywood films to watch. After poo-pooing my taste in films, (she does love the films XD) she recommended Jodhaa Akbar to me and here is my review!

Actually it was really intresting for me, I know quite a lot about ancient cultures in Europe and the Far East but nothing much about India, I also don't know much about Muslim involvement there either, so I found it intresting to watch a story about a Muslim King and a Hindu Queen.

Basic Plot:
Akbar is the heir to some kingdom or other and wants to take over the whole of Hindustan, as a boy he shows a tendancy to be lenient and kind, especially to his
prisoners whom he refuses to kill even though his regent says he must. He grows up and so does his ambition, meanwhile Jodhaa is growing up as well, she has a foster brother who she sees as her real brother and they get on well and fight together.
Jodhaa has a condition for marriage and that is her brother should inherit the throne along with her real brother (or something like that) but her father refuses and makes him subordinate (even though his father was king before Jodhaa's father) he leaves in a huff.
Jodhaa's father gets all antsy because the Muslims (that is Akbar) are winning battle after battle (oh and something else I don't remember) so he betrothes Jodhaa to Akbar and a romatic story ensues!

The costumes in this are beautiful! I especially love Jodhaa's dresses, with the beautifully coloured veils, if only I were thin enough to wear those kind of clothes! with the tight short top and all :D.

The settings are beatiful as well, I love the palaces and the shots of the landscape and as for the story, yes it's intresting, I knew immediately that this would be an Epic story, it reminded me very much of European historical movies and folklore, with the "I won't marry you until you win my heart!"

I liked the story, but then I'm a sucker for the arranged marriage turns into love theme :D but I have a low threshold for gagging romance however... I had to have the VLC media player up in the corner of the screen so I could click off whenever a romance scene got too cring worthy for me >_< aaargh...

Also it does suffer from unintentional hilarity due to low budget/bad directing a la the Merlin film haha... the flying axe :D. Also don't expect too much from the characters, they are like many legends, cut-outs of social norms... I may have talked about this before somewhere... hmm...

So if you like, pretty costumes, epic historical stories, bollywood singing (the singing was good but you might want to fastforward they get pretty long sometimes...)
then look this up :D.