Seven Years in Tibet
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Movie Reviews of Seven Years in Tibet
Movie Review: AWESOME MOVIE
Summary: 5 Stars
You will love this movie. I cried like a baby several times. The shots of Lhasa are amazing.
Movie Review: Great Film!!
Summary: 5 Stars
I really enjoyed this film! I liked the depiction of the Dalia Lama and his life growing up. Free Tibet!!!Movie Review: Seven Years in Tibet
Summary: 5 Stars
This is a great movie and i am extremely happy with this show. ThanksMovie Review: A Story of Love and Peace
Summary: 5 Stars
This film should be a must-see for all high school aged children.Movie Review: Tashi Delek
Summary: 4 Stars
Brad Pitt is the star power in this 1997 movie based on the memoir of Heinrich Harrer, an Austrian alpinist, Anschluss supporter, Nazi Party member, and devil-may-care adventurer whose Third Reich-backed climbing team undertakes a failed attempt to conquer the Himalayan peak Nanda Parbat in the summer of 1939.
Upon turning back, they are interned as Prisoners of War by the British in India, their two nations having gone to war while Harrer and his fellows were involved in the climb.
Harrer escapes from British detention in 1940, and undertakes a difficult trek to the isolated Kingdom of Tibet, ruled over by the XIV Dalai Lama, then only a toddler. Although Harrer and his companion are at first shown the borders back into India, they manage to evade the Tibetan authorities and eventually find themselves in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet.
The Tibetans make them welcome after being assured of their friendly intentions, and they remain in Lhasa for the duration of the war. Harrer is one day spied out by the young Dalai Lama who is playing with a newly-acquired telescope, and he is brought to the Dalai Lama's presence. He and the youngster quickly bond, and for His Holiness Harrer becomes a window on the modern world and a close confidant.
For his part, Harrer is deeply affected by the peaceful spiritual ways of the Tibetans and renounces Naziism and all forms of violence. The 1950 Chinese incursion into Tibet devastates him emotionally. Monasteries are burned, monks killed en masse, and the Red Chinese, declaring that "religion is poison" attempt to eradicate Buddhism and the indigenous culture root and branch from the land. A brutal weeklong Sino-Tibetan War is ended when the Tibetan Minister of Defense (B.D. Wong), somewhat of a Chinese stooge, throws open the border crossings.
His Holiness, in mortal danger himself, gives Harrer, at some danger as a European, leave to go. Harrer returns to Austria. As history was to show, the XIV Dalai Lama followed his friend into exile in 1959. The two remained friends until Harrer's death in 2006.
Pitt is a more than adequate Harrer, though not flinty enough. His accent occasionally slips. Pitt misses the mark as Harrer, when he, unbelievably, transmutes from a self-righteous, self-absorbed man and committed Fascist to a paradigm of compassion instantaneously and completely. I have no doubt that being in the presence (particularly the constant presence) of His Holiness is a life-altering experience, but Harrer's evolution is so compressed in time that it seems staged and unconvincing. His spiritual evolution should have been a profound element in the story, not a cinematic wind sprint.
SEVEN YEARS IN TIBET focuses too heavily on Harrer and not heavily enough on Tibetan culture, the Sino-Tibetan conflict, or the Dalai Lama, who is really a secondary player (though an important one) in this film. More focus on the land in which Harrer found himself would have deepened this film considerably.
Still, overall, this is a film about a beautiful land, a beautiful culture, and a beautiful people hunted like animals to the edge of extinction by what has turned out to be the ultimate paper tiger---Chinese Communism. Beijing owes Lhasa a million lives and a thousand years of culture. The least they can do is free Tibet.