Conquest 1453 (2012), Faruk Aksoy
IMDB.COM: Rating: 7.6 (39,000+ votes)
Even if you are not a historian or even remotely interested in history, you ought to know by default the two of the most impor- tant dates that took place in the 15th century: The Fall of Constantinople (1453) and The Discovery of America (1492). In 1992, the year that marked the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s famous sea voyage expedition to India, the latter was the subject of two big-budget movie projects (1492: Conquest of Paradise and Christopher Columbus: The Discovery), where both of them stunk so memorably that all they left behind was a couple of shipwrecks and Vangelis’s majestic soundtrack (the Ridley Scott version). In 2012, the Turks decided to put the fall of Byzantine by their hand on the big screen.
In all the years I’ve been watching numerous historical spectacles from all across the globe, I can assure you that I’ve never ever experienced such a transparent and disgraceful abuse of cinema. In 160 minutes of how long this poor excuse of a picture lasts, there’s absolutely no reason why the team that stands behind it shouldn’t be forbidden to even come near a movie camera for the next quarter of a century, even if the reason for their initiative is purely amateur nature. I could go even further and say they should be punished for making such an empty, nationalistic piece of propaganda void of any notion of both history of the cinema and history of the world in general, but then I wouldn’t be any better than the pseudo-intellectuals that made it. Conquest 1453 fails miserably on every single level of moviemaking and ethics, drowning sensibility of the Mid- dle East and Islam in the filthiness of cheap emotional tricks of Hollywood. I may come as an ultimate lecturer, but the movie in question combines the worst of the two worlds – the Western capitalistic exploitation of a perverted past and the Eastern religious demonization of everything that exists outside of Kur’an. Do not buy its high IMDb.com ratings, not even for a sec- ond. The vast majority of those votes were made by the Turkish people who desperately want to believe that their great Otto- man Empire was solely based on honorable and heroic deeds and that their latest insight is a faithful depiction of some- thing that is otherwise considered as a crime against humanity and an act of nothing short than a murder of one so revered and prosperous civilization.
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