This movie was paid for by the church so that the basic plot holds itself true to the living of saint Alexius of Moscow. Still the director managed to make the best out of it, to pack it together with a lovely tale about an overlooked page of Russian history: the impending collapse of the Golden Horde. And rotting it starts from the head, with the uncouth assassination of khan Tini Beg by his brother Jani Beg.
This is a refreshing view for historical cinema. Hitherto the Horde was never given any lines of dialogue. You might have seen Andrey Rublev by Tarkovsky: they raze a city to the ground and ride away. In Eisenstein's Nevsky they're also shown to be an amorphous sinister outside force which can intervene on someone's behalf in Russian politics but is never doing anything on their own. They've been hitherto shown as unspeakable savages, as the Borg, as the zerg but never as dramatic characters, as yet another wave of brutal Russian statesmen, akin to the Bolsheviks or to Ivan the Terrible's thugs. The movie dispels the myth the Tatar Yoke was felled by the Russians in the Grand Standing on the Ugra river. You're shown it instead has removed itself, decades in advance, in a painfully similar manner to so many other political entities on the Russian soil.
An interesting moment lost on foreign viewers is usage of language in the film. It is amusing to see some obscure Central Asian language being the prestige dialect, the lingua franca, to all of the Russians. Today it's the other way round.
