A thrilling tale of discovery! An action packed adventure to the darkest heart of Africa! Two men in a search for fame, fortune and the source of the Nile! That's what I was expecting when I began to watch this movie. A tedious snore-fest is what I got instead. It took some true skill to take a scene where two explorers defend themselves against a thousand screaming tribesmen and suck every last drop of vitality out of it. And if the director could kill the excitement there, how much more of a suffocating tomb are the scenes in the England of garden parties and academic lectures in front of the Royal Geographic Society? The last half of the movie is the worst of all where the story focuses on the petty squabble between the two friends and the nit picking as to who really discovered lake Victoria. Save some time and pain and just read the Wikipedia entry for Richard Francis Burton. It's a hell of a lot more entertaining than this film.
Mountains of the Moon - Tow Jockey Five Second Review
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It is that movie. Which is my main point...the movie even though it has scenes like this that should have made it interesting was in fact as exciting as watching paint dry.
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Mountains of the Moon had the tremendous disadvantage of being based closely on written accounts of actual events. It would have been easy to make this a more exciting movie by turning it into a work of fiction and maybe throwing in some magic and a lost city. I don't believe it was ever marketed as an action movie and is really more an indie/arthouse movie with a bit of action. A straight-up action movie would have been unconcerned with the post-exploration conflict between Burton and Speke, and incapable of explaining Speke's suicide. I personally liked Mountains of the Moon, though I didn't love it.
Is this the movie where he gets the spear through the jaw? Then a horrible beetle crawls into his ear while sleeping? If so, then you are so totally wrong, if not then carry on.