Queen of the Desert (2015)

This a movie that elevates the spirit and expands your horizons. It invites to beautiful scenery of the desert and its people. Captivating music enhances your experience. You will be glad you spent two hours watching this movie, preferably with you significant other or a friend, as you will want to talk to somebody about it. You will also want to read a book about Gertrude Bell and about the Middle East after watching ... ideally visit there as well although most places (Syria, Iraq, Iran) are too dangerous to travel to.

Needless to say if you are into zombies, senseless violence and action, you will be disappointed.

By the way, as some have said this is probably the most accessible and viewer friendly film by W. Herzog ... I hope there are more to come.

Lastly N. Kidman is a great actress and a treat to watch ... but it is true that she was neither the right age nor the right person for this role (too fragile). Still both my wife and me enjoyed her screen presence.

Fmovies: Queen of the Desert might be Herzog's most brilliant film to date. But it is not a work of genius--not because it isn't great but because Herzog failed to dumb it down for average movie-going audiences. Hence for many it will come across as a stock, even boring, romantic adventure drama. If you see it that way, well, I can't help you. It is timely, beautiful, and relevant. Most reviewers missed the mark on this one, although in a commercial sense it probably won't be successful because it will fly over the heads of typical audiences, especially in the U.S.

Warning for the masses: no spaceships or aliens, and precious few gunbattles. (Btw, I'm in Wisconsin, and I hate history lessons.)

This film was an attractive costume drama which would not have been out of place on Masterpiece Theater, but anyone familiar with Gertrude Bell's achievements and who has read the book 'Desert Queen', will be disappointed at how much was left out. Yes, she was born to a wealthy family, had a brilliant mind, earned a first class degree at Oxford - even attending Oxford was a rarity for a woman at that time. She mixed in the best society being very well connected socially, and also enjoyed the company of many intellectuals of the day. Yes, she fell in love with Henry Cadogan and mourned his death for seven years. She had been prevented from marrying him by her overly possessive parents on some very flimsy grounds - he was a gambler and had no fortune, when they could have easily set up a trust fund for her which he could not touch. Her parents apparently even opened her mail to ensure that she was not being led astray. Her dutiful devotion and love for her parents may have caused her later infatuations and unrequited love for the wrong men.

Her friendship with the married Doughty Wiley was shown, as was her iffy working relationship with T. E. Lawrence who supported her while being quite catty behind her back, but her later unrequited love for Henry Fitzsimmons, who used her but refused flat out to marry her, was not. Nor was her long and very close friendship with King Faisal of Iraq, which began when he was Prince and whom she had been instrumental in supporting on the throne. As Faisal's wife and family remained in Mecca and Gertrude became his close adviser, many suspected that they were lovers.

Her years of round the world tours to get over Henry's death were left out. Eventually she began her journeys through the middle east and gained the knowledge which put her in the center of things in WWI as a source of information about the Arab tribes, and supporter and close adviser to King Faisal. She was present at the Paris Peace Conference when the winners, desperate to get their hands on the oil, divided up the middle east between them, largely reneging on the promises to allow the Arabs their own kingdom and instead installing puppet kingdoms under British and French mandates.

The film ended with a very brief meeting with Faisal and his brother Abdullah, and an epilogue about the creation of Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia where Gertrude Bell had helped define the borders and choose the rulers. But there was much more to the story. After the heady success of helping to create the modern middle eastern kingdoms, being appointed Oriental Secretary awarded the CBE, and being Faisal's right hand woman, called upon every day not only for advice, but companionship, games, tennis, Gertrude found herself becoming less and less important as her task had ended. It probably did not help that she was a woman and had trodden on quite a few toes on the way up. Men would have felt threatened by her and wives would have been jealous. She concentrated her efforts on her writing and establishing the Baghdad Museum, but her life had become empty and no doubt she felt unwanted and useless. Faisal saw less of her and spent more time in Europe 'taking the cures'. Her family fortune disappeared in the post war changing times and she was reduced to living alone if not in poverty, but 'straightened circumstances'. In 1926 she died of an overdose of sleeping pills, which was ruled an accident.

Other than leaving half the story out, the other serious flaw was the miscasting of Faisal and

Queen of the Desert fmovies. What a massive disappointment from Herzog. Before this I was a huge Herzog fan, which is why this film is such a bizarre shock. It was as though Werner Herzog had suddenly become a pupil of Josh Boone, which is like Mozart taking lessons from Justin Bieber. Is this some kind of joke?

Sadly not. This is an over long, melodramatic, corny idealisation of an aristocratic woman who, having no real responsibilities in life, decides to use her vast wealth to embark on a life long holiday across the desert, because really what else is she do with her time?

Throughout the film the main character is idealised, swooned over, worshipped and deferred to. Why? Not because she belongs to the most privileged and powerful class of women on the planet, but because she has a courageous heart and a deep, enigmatic understanding of Arabs.

At the end we have some childish moralising about the injustice of the British empire, aptly spoken from one aristocrat to another (without a lick of irony) and then the 'Queen' of the upper classes rides off into the desert to be immortalised as a female idol for generations to come. Not that she actually did anything to help anyone whatsoever.

Poorly acted, poorly written, poorly conceptualised and thoroughly boring.

Although it's not Lawrence of Arabia, and Robert Pattinson suffers from O'Toole comparison, director Werner Herzog still brings to life the hitherto little-known heroine, Gertrude Bell (Nicole Kidman). Her exploits at the beginning of the 20th century helped cast a favorite light on Bedouins and Druses as she moved among them and helped negotiate the end-of-WWI land split in Arabia and environs.

Herzog will have to suffer my criticism that remembers his crazed but magnetic wild men like Aguirre and Fitzcaraldo. Queen lacks the energy in his many stories of madmen like Aguirre. Here, while Nicole appears aristocratic and smart, she never rises above the thoughtful scholar or emerging anthropologist.

Alas, too much is the time spent with the two loves of her life and not enough time among the tribes and diplomats she had to corral to get her inside unknown territory. Why must women in movies still be defined by the men they love?

Herzog is not at his best with virtually half the film watching her dance around the Tehran Embassy diplomat, Henry Cadogan (James Franco), and the British officer, Charles Doughty-Wylie (Damian Lewis). Herzog misses the more romantic possibilities of her involvement in the war effort in favor of two not very interesting romances.

That her loves tend toward their suicide hints at the powerful woman who could have sparked these annihilations. Kidman, a fine actress who gives a nuanced performance here, is mostly directed to play coy more than adventuresome.

Obviously the director of this movie does not understand the context of the middle east and he is taking this part of the world as a bulk and treating it as a whole. When in Tehran they speak Arabic, Tehran is in Iran they speak Farisi not Arabic, when in the market one guy is obviously Moroccan while the movie is narrating a middle eastern story (Amman Jordan) different dialect, and the Beddouin music always starting with Allah W Akbar which is a religious chant not necessarily specific to the middle east where you can find Christians, Kurds and a lot more ethnicity. To make long story short the director reflected his understanding of the ME based on orientalist concepts and not real facts.