BANG RAJAN (Thailand, 2001)
Directed by: Thanit Jitnukul
Starring: Winai Kraibutr, Bin Bunluerit, Jaran Ngamdee, Chumphorn Thepphithak

"... the film takes on an elemental power and...a heroic stature."

- Derek Elley, Variety

The original rumble in the jungle, BANG RAJAN roars out of the rain forest like divine retribution. It's a story every Thai schoolkid knows; one of those historical legends that's true, but sounds too made-up to be real. In 1765 Burma invaded Thailand and sacked its capital. The Burmese army advanced on two fronts, but one column of 100,000 soldiers got held up at a little rural village called Bang Rajan, where every man woman and child put down their ploughs and picked up big, flesh-cleaving sabers and held off the invading Burmese army for five weeks.

With renewed Thai/Burmese border tensions, BANG RAJAN rises up out of the humid rain forest like a bloody ghost, dappled with jungle canopy sunlight, and spattered with gore and viscera. One part The Alamo, one part Seven Samurai, this is the most popular film ever released in Thailand (more than doubling the take of Titanic) until it was bumped from that spot by the recently release Suriyothai. Focusing on Thai royalty (and funded and produced by Thai royalty) with a two year production and a massive budget, Suriyothai stands in direct contrast to BANG RAJAN's powerfully primitivist tale of a bunch of nobodies who charged into the teeth of hell and died because they didn't have any other choices. Suriyothai's characters wear a lot of fancy clothes and head gear. BANG RAJAN's buff and bloody villagers spend their screentime covered in sweat, grime and grue.

Like Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers, only without the camp, this matinee classic uses the conventions of the war movie to hunt bigger prey. A tacked-on end crawl tries to make the heroism of the villagers a larger statement about the resilience of the Thai fighting spirit, but the whole movie that came before argues that they fought because they were so rooted to their home that when trouble came, they didn't have any option but to stand and fight. These aren't middle class merchants with the ability to pick up and make tracks when the going gets hot, these are peasants who eke out an existence in the jungle. They don't fight because they hate the Burmese, they fight because their fields and grain stores are all they have. And then the fighting, their ability to hold back a tide that they know will drown them, takes on a life of its own. Their eagerness to know just how long they can hold out drives them to take foolhardy risks. And the longer they play with fire, the more inevitable the final burn.

Acquiring incident and detail as it rumbles along, BANG RAJAN is an emotional snowball that grows larger as it thunders to its climax. Unfolding like a muscular fist hammering on the table of history, with a musical score that'll make the blood roar in your ears, BANG RAJAN proves that while Hollywood just can't make good epics anymore, Thailand can.