Tag: Film

How Star Wars’ Jedi were inspired by the Knights Templar

Reading time: 5 minutes
Star Wars is once again in the spotlight and pulling on nostalgic heartstrings in the new Disney+ limited series Obi-Wan Kenobi, starring Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen. The series follows members of the knightly order of Jedi as they are persecuted across the galaxy. What many might not know is the idea of the Jedi was heavily influenced by the real history of the Knights Templar.

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On the screen: Cold warriors

Reading time: 4 minutes
The Courier, directed by Dominic Cooke, is a film of the Cold War with the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 as backdrop. The central characters, British salesman Greville Wynne (Benedict Cumberbatch) and GRU (Soviet military intelligence) Colonel Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze), are centre stage, but the real dynamic is the challenge issued by the Soviet Union and its empire to the United States and its Western allies. Infamously, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had boasted that the USSR would bury the West and this claim features in the opening of the movie. A nuclear war between the two superpowers of the time emerges as possible as the Soviet presence in Cuba is revealed to be more threatening than originally thought.

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A TALE OF REMEMBRANCE, ADMONITION, AND DESPAIR: ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT

Reading time: 6 minutes
The vivid and graphic imagery of the First World War has indeed become a potent symbol of the need for everlasting commemoration, and a continuous reminder of armed conflict’s futility. Yet with the inevitable passing of time, direct links to the “War to end all Wars” have regretfully vanished, with all veterans who served in the trenches now gone. This most special group of soldiers may now be physically silent, but their haunting messages of warning remain.

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The Mafia, The Godfather, and the Hollywood romance

Reading time: 8 minutes
The Godfather. Perhaps one of the greatest films and franchises of all time; March 24, 2022, will mark the 50th anniversary of the film’s theatrical release, which is a number that in ways seems both large and small. Large from the perspective that it has already been five decades since it shook the cinematic world, yet small in that a film of such importance and influence was released in the backyard of our modern history: 1972.

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