ADD this to the accolades the movie has gotten, Heneral Luna is a fucking masterpiece. It is the miracle of what a low-budget movie can achieve with flawless acting and a brilliant script that shows Tagalog is not exhausted in the circular claptrap of our young politicians.
Tagalog has a far wider range for poetry and rhetoric than anyone suspected listening to its misuse and abuse of late. That the battle scenes were on a small scale, within comparatively modest spaces, might be appropriate since our revolutionary battles never involved the vast numbers, staggering logistics and level of mechanization deployed in the Mexican revolution, where Pancho Villa used machine guns, howitzers, trains and at least a quarter of a million men and horses across the length and breadth of Mexico, thereby inviting the curiosity of German, Japanese, American and French military observers interested in what the next war will be like.
The actor who played Luna gave an unfailingly credible performance of volcanic temper, poetic sensibility, and a melancholy sense of invited doom as the hero rushes to the fate he is begging for at the hands of equally proud, equally pedigreed and equally feeling-entitled notables. He doesn’t just step; puñeta, he stomps on their toes with his boots. But the movie should’ve hinted that Luna in Europe might have observed Prussian military maneuvers. They were all the rage after the Prussian victory over the French at Sedan in 1870. That might explain his generalship.
Aguinaldo was portrayed with a hissing sibilant snakelike coldness, that yet leaves room for the interpretation that, after all, Aguinaldo was right like Stalin to eliminate Luna the way Leon Trotsky was done (their victories in the field notwithstanding). Revolution cannot be left to romantics or war only to generals. After all, Gregorio del Pilar, who was a Confederate raider in his panache, stayed loyal to Aguinaldo.
To watch this movie is a rare treat that nobody should deny themselves. It segues from cinema to stage drama to poetic declamation without a hitch or awkward moment. It is a kind of education, if not always of history as it happened, then of revolutionary sensibilities as they were then. Watching it is an act of patriotism. This movie should be shown in every military camp in the country.
I thought the explicit references to Buencamino, whose son was my father’s war buddy and best friend, and of Paterno, will cause needless pain. But the third part of what promises to be a trilogy of the Three Who Made a Revolution (to borrow the title of a famous study of the Russian Revolution) might give justice to the role of realists in a hopeless fight. Fifteen years after we surrendered, Germany surrendered to the United States and the other likely fate of our nation was a sale to Germany, which, even then, already adopted genocidal policies against inferior races. In fact, the birth-control movement by the famous slut, Margaret Sanger who slept with Goebbels (a man as ugly as he was sinister), was initiated by Field Marshal von Hindenburg, who urged the white powers to unite
instead of fight each other to reduce the numbers of the colored races to manageable levels of docility and slavery. Yes, birth control has racist roots and for colored Filipino legislators to espouse it is a kind of joke on their race.
The movie does historical justice to Luna’s unremembered lieutenants, the likes of Alejandrino, brave like Marshal Ney but not inconstant. He fought ferociously for Napoleon until the latter surrendered; Ney switched to his enemies but rejoined Napoleon when the latter returned from Elba to fight for him again with the same brilliance and daring at Waterloo. He survived despite every attempt to get himself killed so as to cover himself with glory in defeat. The British just put him up against a wall and shot him. The movie also explains the prestige of Quezon of the Army of the Republic when he became president of the Commonwealth. But enough of this. Just watch the movie and support the effort to recover our past, not with dull writing but in moving pictures, so we can plot our future less foolishly than our forefathers made the past.