The Kite Runner 2007
I had heard a lot of good things about this movie before watching it so my expectations may have been a little high. The setting is mostly in pre-Soviet Afghanistan with some parts during the Taliban era. That is a setting most Americans don’t know very much about, so it makes for a good start. But the primary story about the son of a well off man in Kabul and his friend, the son of the family servant, goes badly. It starts off okay and the servant’s son is an interesting guy, but things get out of hand quickly. I don’t think I’m giving anything away and I kind of wish I had known this beforehand (spoiler alert), but the servant boy who is only maybe 10 years old is raped by a teenaged boy. So that’s pretty much as bad as Deliverance, which was pretty shocking. But then the other kid, who knows about the attack, does nothing to stop it, then treats the servant kid like complete dirt. He’s essentially treating him just as bad. So now I don’t like that kid and he’s the primary character and storyteller. There’s a little redemption, but the violence continues with the stoning of women and more buggering implied later on.
What gets me about this movie is the reviews say it is a great story of friendship, but this is a very harsh, cold movie. Worse, I was horrified most of the time thinking it was a true story, but then got kind of mad that some writer thought this would be good fiction. The author is using violence against children to hook you rather than using well-developed characters. He had good characters to start with, but went astray with the violence.
Anyway, if you can get past a little boy being raped and then treated like crap by the jerk that claims to have been his friend, this is a good movie that sheds some light on Afghanistan, a country the US invaded without many people knowing much about it or its history. So you will probably learn something, but I don’t think it is worth the price. B-.
Written: 10 Jan 2009