Son's Will

If you're thinking of watching this movie, it's a world you've already seen somewhere before, Into the Badlands (TV series), Mad Max 2 (1981), The 100 (TV series)... Old folk tales from Serbia, introduced into the post-apocalyptic future, give a special experience.

The scenery and costumes are irresistibly reminiscent of the aforementioned series, so the viewer will get the hang of it very quickly, but the problem remains the misunderstanding of the narrator with the instrument, which is characteristic of Serbian folk songs from the 16th and 18th centuries, so if you are not close to Serbian culture, this would be an obstacle in understanding the plot of the film.

In general, it is a big step forward in the Serbian film industry. It can always be better and there will always be critics with bad reviews. Considering that this is the first film made with this kind of theme in Serbia, we have to be more tolerant.

This movie is the first of its kind of these kinds of movies in Serbia. It has a great pace; the background lore is given in moderation; the characters are believable and you easily love the and cheer for the heroes, and hate and boo the villains, without anyone coming off as comical; character motivations are there, and every reaction makes sense from an internal logic standpoint.

The movie tells a classic hero's journey tale: a farm guy leaves his home behind to embark on a quest to save the ones he love, gets the girl, fights the bad guy minions to have an epic showdown with the main bad guy at the end, and returning to the starting places, having changed in the process.

The movie blends Serbian culture, style, and folklore elements with modern and more "Western" style, resulting in a very unique blend. It might be wrongully called "Serbian Mad Max" or "Serbian Fallout", but the comparison is only superficial: a post-apocalyptic setting. This is where the similarities end. It's a thing of its own, with its own identity, and a possibility of a wider story with future installments.

If this is the first of these kinds of modern epics to come, then it is a bright future for sure!

Since it is the first serbian movie of thing, I can give it three stars,otherwise,it hardly deserves one. The actors are average,the scenes and atmosphere are good,aometimes excelent,but the plot is so boring and fails to deliver at the end. Believe me,you will forget what the movie was about in two weeks,that is how faint impression it leaves. And when I think that I wanted to go to the cinema to watch it,what a waste of time it would have been!

A post-apocalyptic epic coming to the world from Serbia no less! A lot of motifs from the old Serbian heroic poetry, re-imagined in a new world that came out of nuclear war.

The main problem with the movie is that it isn't a movie at all. In Serbian cinematography they have this practice of creating a mini-series and also cutting it down into a movie for release in the cinemas. The Son's Will series is 8 episodes, 40 minutes long each. They had to cut it into 150 minutes movie that now simultaneously feels both too long and too short, as too much is crammed in with not enough exposure to explain all.

The scenes are very competently made and acted. A big issue is that the movie is very Americanized, not in the spirit of Serbian cinematography, so some dialogs and actions feel very cringey for domestic viewers, while I don't know how much it will appeal to international audience that has no idea what "gusle" is.

First and foremost, I can't express how proud and grateful I am to everyone involved in making this film. This is a huge step for Serbian, and I dare say ex-Yugoslav, cinema, and it fully deserves praise in that regard.

I absolutely disagree with other reviews that mention bad acting. On the contrary, the casting was fantastic, and most of the actors did an excellent job. This film also showed me how many "cinematic" actors we have, those whom the camera truly loves (the Bencina brothers for example). Let's be clear, this isn't a movie where anyone's acting is supposed to stand out, and it doesn't need to. Yes, there were a few lines of dialogue that made me raise an eyebrow in dismay, but that's negligible. What was truly irritating, loud, and downright ridiculous was: "OBJAVA KULE, OBJAVA KULE" repeated every 10 minutes by a Santa Claus figure holding a vacuum cleaner pipe.

The special effects in this film are either a hit or a major miss. For example, some fight scenes with lots of blood look incredibly professional and have the aesthetic this film should aim for-it doesn't look cheap, which is very important. However, some basic scenes, which have been done countless times in both high-budget and low-budget films, look like a cartoon here. Specifically, I'm referring to the machine gun shooting scene, for instance.

The sound is good, and the music is excellent. My only small criticism regarding the music is that the gusle (a traditional Serbian instrument) weren't incorporated more throughout the entire film, as it is precisely the instrument through which the storyteller narrates the tale.

Where this film earns my biggest criticism-and hence the lower rating-is in its editing, or more precisely the reason behind it: a trend in our cinema, present since the release of "Montevideo, Bog te video", of turning films into series. This film, however, seems to have done the opposite. A 2.5-hour film is paced so quickly that I fear the average shot length would be alarmingly short if analyzed thoroughly. An epic story like this, with a solid concept or at least the ambition to compare itself to films like "Mad Max" or "Dune", should never have allowed itself to be butchered by such rapid cuts, especially since this type of film is appearing on our screens for the first time.

The title of this review, a line spoken by one of the characters to the storyteller, "Tell him to speed up a bit, we don't need to know everything," is the very irony this film has suffered. Quite the opposite-I was drawn into the story and wanted to know everything, slowly and at my own pace, rather than watch a 2.5-hour trailer that feels like a setup for a series. I'd much rather watch this film split into multiple parts than a butchered version made to resemble a series.

Finally, I have just one question for the creators: Fidget spinner... really?