Clash of Empires (BLU-RAY)

The year is 120 AD and the Roman Empire is expanding their rule to Central Asia. In hopes to unite the East and West countries, it was agreed that the Roman Prince Marcus Carprenius (played by Gavin Steinhouse) would marry the Han Dynasty Princess Meng Li Hua (played by Jing Lusi). While on their voyage to meet his future wife, Prince Marcus’ fleet all sink except for his own ship which sinks once he reaches the shores. With no gold to hire a new crew and captain, Prince Marcus finds a warrior who will help with just a promise of being paid and that he won’t be sentenced to death for offending a local tribe. The warrior Merong (played by Steven Rahman-Hughes) will have to protect the Prince and Princess from harm and in doing so is set upon an adventure that will change his life and possibly the world. 

EMPIRES CRASH..I MEAN CLASH:

This movie has a decent plot idea, one that would be filled with action, adventure, and a love story, which it does, but the execution of these aspect end up being a flop. I thought it would be at least a semi-okay action movie with lots of fights between different armies but what I got was a lot of poor acting where every action/fight scene looked so fake that it made wrestling look real. Watching these fight scenes was laughably bad because of how choreographed the fights looked. It was easily seen how far off some of the punches where from actually hitting the intended person along with some poor acting of the person getting punched.

However, that could have been overlooked, what made this movie so bad was having the movie sped up. Speeds where increased during the fight scenes to make it look like the fighters where moving fast. What it really did was make it look like what it was, the movie being put in fast forward during certain scenes. Still, this might have had a chance of being forgiven if done a few times but it’s done throughout the whole of the movie and even at times when there was no fight scene, just a normal scene that shouldn't’t have been sped up. It’s so bad that it’s not funny, it just looks really bad making the scenes unbelievable.

Still, as bad as the fights/action scenes were, as bad as having them sped up to look like it’s on fast forward, the worst part is the acting. I didn't’t recognize any of the actors in the roles but none of them give a performance that would make their characters real. Merong, the main character, is supposed to be this really tough guy that is a descendant of Alexander the Great but the actor Stephan Rahman-Hughes only makes the character flat and without any emotion. I kept waiting for one of the characters to be interesting in this movie but none ever did. Though there were moments that I was given a glimpse of what might be, they didn't’t last long and the characters that gave them were extras or a minor side character that had very little screen time.

To make matters worse for this movie, the story was throwing in way too much without keeping it in a solid flow. I thought this was going to be a movie about a Prince and a warrior trying to get back a kidnapped Princess. What I got was a movie about a Prince who to a back seat to the story of the warrior whose story was boring even though it was tried to seem cool. I didn't’t care about learning the back story to the character Merong, it wasn't’t needed, it was boring, and it could have been left out without any real damage (other than making the movie shorter) to the movie. I was so bored and a little irritated with watching this movie before it was even a third of the way over.

CLASH OF EMPIRES ON BLU RAY:

Topping the list of negative points to this movie the worse yet was the audio levels. This is the first time that I’ve watched a movie with such horribly bad audio levels. At the start of this movie there is a narrator given a back story that sets up the whole movie, only the levels are so low that I had to turn my television volume up to nearly 60, yes 60, at the highest I’ve had it at is 25. Yet even with it being so loud it was hard to really understand what was being said. This is because the voice track seemed to be lower than the sound track and the rest of the sounds. These low levels in the voice levels remain through the whole movie making it hard to understand what is being said but all other sounds where at about the same level which made it almost blend out the sound of anything said. Surprisingly though, the picture quality is the best portion of this whole movie. There’s some great looking colors in this movie making it look really nice. Here is a movie that has a beautiful, crisp, sharp, clear picture and quality that makes a Blu Ray look better than anything before but the picture just can’t save the movie from itself.

DVD Images

Cover: 

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