I’ll never forget the first time I walked through the main gate of the Lahore Fort. A majestic Mughal structure, impossibly thick walls surrounding ridiculously luxurious pavilions, it made me think: How can a dynasty this powerful vanish from the world?
I had mundane thoughts, too. As we walked through the main gate, on the path used by Mughal armies, it occurred to me that whoever designed the “stairs” had done a horrible job. We stepped up several inches, plodded along for several long strides before ascending a few inches again.
If you’ve encountered badly designed staircases before, you know there’s something nasty about the consequences of those failed calculations, which you feel in your knees. Until I was informed that the stairs hadn’t been designed for mere mortals like myself, no matter what my last name, but instead for the empire’s war elephants.
Some of the Mughal Emperors awoke every morning, stepped out onto their verandah, and on sight of His Majesty, their armored elephants, assembled like troops in ranks, had been trained to bow. I wondered then why there wasn’t a more representative Lord of the Rings out there.
Fetih: 1453 beat me to it. The most expensive Turkish movie ever, the long, action-packed film opens in 7th century Medina, where we learn the Prophet Muhammad has predicted the conquest of Constantinople at the hands of a blessed commander and blessed army. The film’s trailer also opens with this hadith, or saying, of Muhammad, well known among many Turks…
But Fetih doesn’t let us sit still for long. Within minutes we’re launched into 15th century Anatolia, into the obsessive quest of the young Ottoman Sultan Mehmet (Muhammad, in Turkish pronunciation), desperately trying to conquer Constantinople and make a name for himself.
The great battle in April and May 1453 may well be the pivotal moment in Ottoman history, and lends itself well to loud, pounding, bloody, overwhelming action. As the world gets more global, one upside is: We have more stories we can transform into blockbusters. Or ruin.
Fetih isn’t an amazing movie. It’s certainly well made, and has its moments, but it plays patriotically with history (though, what would you expect?) The last Byzantine Emperor is a pasty, conniving caricature, busy with relatively tame Jacuzzi parties while his nemesis readies the world’s most fearsome war machine.
For a student of history, it was intriguing to see how the Turks try to recreate their history, with all the delicate contortions required for a secular Turkish Republic to make on behalf of a pluralist, Islamically-oriented but far more demographically diverse predecessor state.
It’s also cool to see giant cannons and billowing flags and, in a surreal moment, that stereotypical Muslim call to prayer in the background—not during a battle scene, mind you, but while a talented young woman cuts her hair to mask her gender, to take her place on the frontlines.
Fetih’s playing in a handfull of New York locations but Fred, the theatre manager at the AMC we went to, said that the movie had done quite well on opening night. In fact it might’ve been their best performer that weekend; since then, he said about 100 people came through every night to watch (mostly Turks).
At the end of the day, it’s supposed to be an adrenaline injection by way of history lesson, but maybe there’s more underneath. For one thing, movies reach more people and more easily than books, so with the spread of more sophisticated media production, perhaps we can all experience other cultures a bit more easily.
Fetih might feel uncomfortable—we’re not used to seeing things from the other side of Europe. (The only Easterners in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy were swarthy orientals who’d sided with pure evil.) Maybe now we know how the rest of the world feels on watching some of our more self-centered thrillers, in which America alone can save the planet.
But get beyond that and Fetih should feel very familiar—it’s a Turkish version of a summer blockbuster, with big battles and loud special effects and blood and guts and girls and glory. At the end of the day, this entertainment might just prove how much we all have in common.
