ZackLemcheck

The 3D presentation of this looks to me like the first movie actually made in the 21st century. As for some of the other comments here, I can only paraphrase Lincoln - "The good Lord must have loved the common-minded people. He made so many of them."

I don't think it's appropriate to expect a narrative from a snapshot - an allegorical snapshot at that - conveying the spiritual cosmology of peasants in the Renaissance. We might as well go to a movie based on "The Persistence of Memory" expecting to get a melodrama about a Spanish watchmaker on LSD. How banal would that be? For me it's enough that the film immerses us in Brueghel's world, from the mud to the heavens, and successfully communicates something of its way of life and thought across an almost interplanetary gulf of psychological distance, through the imagination of the artist.

In the name of all that's holy, let's never put any demands on the audience. If we did they might have to do some serious thinking about character dynamics, racial attitudes in the 19th century, trust and distrust of authority figures, the influence of landscapes in films, all sorts of stuff. Before you know it, you've got elitism.... the opposite of which, I guess, is the great common touch of mindlessness.