If there’s one thing that provides that spectacle, it’s the sweeping panorama of the barren desert. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film which so fully impressed on me the vastness of it, and the corresponding inconsequentiality of a man on a camel, with only a water-skin between him and death.
It’s
quite ironic, isn’t it? And this film lives and breathes irony, placing
characters in so many incongruous situations that it gets a little ridiculous.
The
first is a placard on a peaceful country road marked “DANGER.”
It’s
not much of a spoiler that Lawrence dies an ignominious death—thrown from his
motorcycle into a clump of bushes—in the first five minutes of the film. For a
while, I was confused as to why the filmmakers chose to start us here. I
recognized the heavy contrast of cutting from a motorcycle accident in verdant
Dorset to conversation in the halls of a British colonial outpost to the barren,
utterly foreign desert, but I felt it sucked the uncertainty from Lawrence’s story—we
knew he lived, so what suspense was there? (Spoilers below)
