The Last Emperor

The three hour movie describing the life of Pu Yi was nothing like I thought it was going to be. I was expecting a documentary type movie but instead was blessed with a beautifully filmed presentation of Pu Yi's life in story form. Now, I use the term blessed lightly seeing how it was a lengthly three hour movie but I will admit I rather enjoyed it. What kept me most interested was the flipping back and forth between Pu as a child emperor and as an adult prisoner. It took me until the child Pu got glasses to figure out that the scenes with the prisoner were him. After I caught onto that, the flipping back and forth in between scenes helped fill in detail of the recalling of Pus life. To me, the scene when Pu meets his biological brother plays a crucial role in the movie. It is this scene where Pu realizes that he is only the lord of the forbidden city. He was told at a young age that he was ruler of 10,000 people and yet he was only the lord of a small part of China i.e. "he is the lord of all and nothing" (Criterion). From this point on, we see Pu feeling like a prisoner. Ironically, he feels like a prisoner as an adolescent and is a prisoner during adulthood. Despite the rough prison life Pu had to experience, it caused a change in Pu for the better. He went from a spoiled child who thought he was all powerful, to an old man that blended into China's population. He went from being involved in China's unrest, to watching it from a comfortable distance. Those are just some of my thoughts on the movie. Overall, I was able to enjoy watching the movie and learn from it at the same time.