This movie has cool skeletons in it, but its plot is unfortunately also a skeleton. There's little substance and no meaning to what's going on. The characters don't have names. The fishermen and the shadow fish are never explained. Having a character misquote the section of the Bible concerning Noah's Ark and the Flood does not magically lend your movie any meaning whatsoever, even if your movie's setting seems to be a world that has been flooded. (Also, take a drink for "Japanese media that attempts to use Christian themes without understanding them.") All in all, though this movie is pretty, it's not inventive and not worth your time.
I had a hard time picking a 3.5 or a 4. I can't help but feel I should have like this movie more. It's got my name written all over it: beautiful wilderness, swashbuckling adventure, sympathetic portrayal of (historical) religion, a conflict between nations playing out at the ground level of individual personalities... I can't lay my finger on why I considered it good, but not great.
The procession at ~23 minutes in is superb; I've been meaning to show it to D&D players, including the more orderly, religious part of the procession a few shots later.
Later, after Mendoza has killed his brother, he drags all his equipment up the waterfall in a bag of netting. Nothing attached to his body, around his waist, or on his back.
The bag contains his armor, his sword, and other articles that would be like a second skin to a warrior.
The title is absolutely killer. Pity it wasn't used on a better book.
A World Lit Only By Fire is about the transition from the medieval world to the Renaissance one, focusing on how the rise of Protestantism shattered the medieval worldview's unchanging conceptions of the world and man's place in it. The book offers a reasonably detailed account of the Reformation, and how its flames were fanned by anticlericalism and budding nationalism, but I don't think the author does a great job even staking out a thesis, let alone defending one. He couldn't seem to make up his mind whether he was explaining history or merely describing it.
