I don’t know if I would call Khartoum hot garbage, but I want to call it hot garbage.
Released about five years after Lawrence of Arabia, the movie is an obvious attempt to replicate the aesthetics and feel of David Lean’s grand masterpiece. The problems, though, pop up early and often.
It’s really hard to view Khartoum without thinking of Lawrence of Arabia because the parallels are so numerous. Desert based conflict (the Sudan vs. Arabia) where an Englishman, largely detached from the lower concerns of his contemporaries, walks in to provide military aid to the natives in the face of a large threat. It’s not beat for beat the same story, but it uses so many of the same large brushstrokes that it’s simply distracting. I tried to get past it and enjoy the story for what it had to offer, though.
And yet, the story is told like a highlight reel instead of like an actual story. PM Gladstone doesn’t want to get involved in the Mahdi’s planned invasion of the Sudan, a country England had just freed from slavery. Why he doesn’t want to get involved is unclear. He enlists the help of General Gordon, a hero of every party in England for his previous services in the Sudan, in a fig leaf operation designed to safe England face without actually expending any resources on the effort. There’s a big effort to classify Gordon as apart from any philosophy except his own. It’s this early effort to define Gordon that loses me early, because nothing he does seems to tie into this idea any more than a simple gauzy humanism would accomplish better.
Anyway, as the story progresses, the real problem of the story’s narrative abilities comes into focus. Characters pop in and out of the story with little to no explanation. Months pass without a thought. It’s all so jaggedly cut that it ends up being pretty much purely confusing when it’s not simply laughable. There’s a scene where Gordon sneaks into the Mahdi’s camp to present himself and talk. He reveals his presence to some guards, introduces himself. They respond with misgivings towards his identity, and he throws back his brown robe to reveal an elegant British military uniform underneath. The guards instantly let him through, as though a man speaking English in an English accent and wearing an English uniform could be anyone other than General Gordon. The execution is really just funny.
Nothing in the story really works because not a single character is around long enough to form a connection, no sequence is adequately filmed or presented to illicit anything other than sheer confusion. Battle scenes seem ridiculous in their complete abandonment of any military logic. There’s no real effort to let scenes play out on their own, to develop naturally, or to place a solid sense of geography (either physically in action scenes or intellectually as part of the story).
To bring this back to Lawrence, there are many reasons that Lean’s movie works so well, and one of them is, in fact, its four-hour running time. With that kind of room to tell an epic story, Lean was able to embrace the full breadth of the story while digging depths into every aspect of it from Lawrence’s character to the crossing of the desert to the politics of the ending. Khartoum, by contrast, spends almost no time developing any single element while throwing out the same number. It’s thin, razor thin, and assembled so poorly that I was exasperated through the entire movie, desperate for anything to actually grab onto except the occasionally sumptuous desert vistas.
Netflix Rating: 2/5
Quality Rating: 1/4
David Vining, Author 