The ambition of an epic is a form of cinematic hubris. It manifests in the desire to bend History, with its chaotic and irreducible complexity, to the will of a coherent narrative, a fresco that can, in two or three hours, not only recount an era but forge its myth for present-day spectators. When this hubris meets talent, we get a Lawrence of Arabia or an Andrei Rublev. When it meets sincere populist fervor, a Braveheart. When, however, it is wedded to a political agenda so explicit it becomes a caption, the result is a filmic object like "Red Beard" by Renzo Martinelli. A work that, in its attempt to sculpt a foundational epic from the chronicles of the 12th century, ends up delivering a simulacrum, a cinematic golem whose clay joints are all too visible beneath its coat of mail.

The film presents itself as a chronicle of the struggle of the Lombard League’s city-states against Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, culminating in the legendary Battle of Legnano in 1176. At the center of the story is a young Milanese man named Alberto da Giussano, a figure of more than dubious historicity, here elevated to the rank of eponymous hero, the catalyst for the resistance and the very embodiment of the Padanian spirit of freedom. Opposite him, a Barbarossa played by Rutger Hauer, who brings the glacial charisma of his most iconic roles, from Blade Runner to The Hitcher, but who is shackled by a monolithic characterization, like a villain from a vintage comic book. Their clash is not the conflict between two worldviews, between imperial universalism and communal particularism; it is a Manichaean struggle between Good (the industrious, honest, native Lombard) and Evil (the arrogant, power-hungry foreign oppressor).

This simplification is the stylistic and conceptual signature of the entire work. If Mel Gibson's Braveheart, its obvious and burdensome guiding spirit, was a feral cry steeped in mud and blood, a brutal and romantic ballad about freedom, "Red Beard" is a political rally in costume. The need to forge an immaculate myth, functional for a specific contemporary narrative at the time of its production, drains all ambiguity from the characters and all nuance from History. Alberto da Giussano is not a man with doubts, fears, or flaws; he is a statue in motion, a programmatic manifesto on horseback, declaiming principles of self-determination across the Lombard plains. His words seem to spring not from any inner urgency, but from a script written with the perfect activist's handbook in mind. It's a shame, because the idea of a popular hero, a "faber"—a maker—who becomes a leader, possesses a powerful archetypal potential, with roots stretching from the myth of Cincinnatus to that of Garibaldi. But here, the character is so idealized he becomes inert, an icon devoid of pathos.

Visually, the film does not skimp on opulence. The production, backed by massive and controversial funding, mounts an opulent reconstruction. The costumes are detailed, the sets imposing, and the crowd scenes attempt to evoke the grandeur of Paolo Uccello's frescoes. And yet, here too, something is amiss. The cinematography, often glossy and unnatural, lends the whole affair the air of a high-end television drama rather than a cinematic epic. The battles, though crowded with extras, lack the visceral physicality and choreography of terror that made the ones in Kurosawa's Ran or Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings so memorable. The digital effects, in particular, betray a dated aesthetic, creating an alienating rift between the real elements and those added in post-production, which transforms the plain of Legnano into a landscape from an early-2000s video game. The overall impression is that of a gigantic Live Action Role-Playing event, meticulously staged but devoid of the soul and dust of History.

It is in comparison with other attempts to narrate the Middle Ages that the limitations of "Red Beard" become even more apparent. Think of Bergman's The Seventh Seal, where the knight's return from the Crusades becomes a metaphysical inquiry into faith and death. Or Monicelli's L'armata Brancaleone, which managed to capture the grotesque, picaresque, and profoundly human side of the Middle Ages, using an invented grammelot to convey its cultural distance and plebeian vitality. Even a flawed work like Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven managed to question the complexities of interreligious dialogue and the madness of fanaticism. "Red Beard", by contrast, shies away from all complexity. Its Middle Ages is a stage for a contemporary drama, a pretext for talking about today using the armor of yesterday. There is no attempt to penetrate the mindset of 12th-century man; the characters think and speak like 21st-century people in costume, which makes them not universal, but simply anachronistic.

The cultural operation underpinning the film is, in a way, more fascinating than the film itself. In an age of post-ideologies and fragmented narratives, the attempt to create a "founding myth" from whole cloth is an act of almost Futurist audacity. There is an echo, perversely, of the early 20th-century avant-garde in its desire to build an art that is at once pedagogical and celebratory, an art that serves to mold a collective identity. But while Futurism wanted to burn the museums, "Red Beard" seems to want to embalm them, creating a contrived hagiography that has neither the subversive force of the avant-garde nor the depth of authentic myth. Myth, to be myth, must emerge from a cultural humus; it must be ambiguous, polysemic, able to speak to different generations. A fabricated myth, with its thesis and antithesis already defined, is not a myth: it is propaganda. And propaganda, artistically speaking, is almost always sterile.

Rutger Hauer, in this context, is an almost tragic figure. His Barbarossa has flashes of greatness, moments in which the actor's gaze lets slip a world of imperial weariness, of an awareness of his own historical role. But he is forced to recite lines that reduce him to an operetta tyrant, stripping him of the stature of one of the greatest and most complex sovereigns of the Middle Ages. It is like asking a Stradivarius to play a polyphonic ringtone. His screen presence is the only thing that anchors the film to a semblance of "real" cinema, a ghost of another, more layered and powerful work that might have existed in a parallel universe.

Ultimately, "Red Beard" is a cinematic artifact of extraordinary interest, but not for the reasons its creators had hoped. It is not a masterpiece that consecrates a national epic, but a monument to the failure of art when it makes itself the handmaiden of an ideology. It is a film that dreams of being the Lombard people's Song of Roland but ends up with the depth of an election flyer. One watches it with the same curiosity one would reserve for an anomalous fossil: not for its beauty, but for the story it tells of its own singular and melancholy extinction. An epic that was ruinous from birth, not for lack of resources, but from an excess of certainty. And cinema, like History, rarely thrives on certainty.