For many years, I had been warned and had only seen the film dubbed in my native French (it did help that Depardieu dubbed himself, as did supporting actor Tcheky Karyo), but upon seeing the film "as intended" I was simply baffled. It is a pity then that his English was nowhere near good enough to carry the film. It's hard to imagine anyone else in the role. His Columbus is a tragic idealist, likable even when carried away by his own arrogance. Depardieu exudes a very un-Hollywood brand of charisma: grounded, vulnerable, but also prone to hardness and anger. Supposedly, Scott immediately had his sights set on Depardieu, which paradoxically leads us to both the film's greatest asset and liability. It took several studios to co-finance this massive undertaking, based on a screenplay by journalist Rose Bosch. But the "new world" experiment fails badly and before long utopia becomes a stage for jealousy, manipulation, superstition and even genocide. What he discovers is a whole new world, the Caribbean islands. We know the story, or we think we do: Columbus, an Italian immigrant, gets a grant from Queen Isabella of Spain to map a shorter route to India, sailing West. Ridley Scott, director of Alien, Legend and Blade Runner, was telling the story of Christopher Columbus, starring the venerable Gerard Depardieu, all to a score by Vangelis which flew off the shelves faster than any film score since, well, Blade Runner. 1492 was massive in Europe when it came out. So fast-forward a decade and a half at least. My young mind did not process a lot of the plot - and in retrospect I can partly blame the makers of this film - but I did notice shots, sounds, music. It is one of the first films I remember seeing where I started thinking of all the activity that went into making a film. 1492 casts a long shadow over my filmgoing life.
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