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Arabia, The late 500s/early 600s: Bilal (Adewale
Akinnuoye-Agbaje) and his sister Ghufaira (Cynthia
Kaye McWilliams), born free, are enslaved by Umayya (Ian
McShane), who at first doesn't even seem too bad of a master - until he
and his fellow slaves receive the message from early Islam that all humans
are equal ... and he starts to dream, and starts a quiet revolution, which
almost gets his head cut off until Hamza (Dave B. Mitchell) buys him from
Umayya - but fails to buy Bilal's sister as well, which makes Bilal swear
revenge. Fortunately, Hamza is with a movement to free all slaves and has
only "bought" Bilal because he saw some extraordinary qualities
in him that would have gone lost had he tried to get him any other way,
and now he trains him to be a warrior against injustice - and injustice is
something Bilal has experienced more than enough of. But can all the
ideology behind Bilal and Hamza take up fight with the troupes of Umayya
and his especially evil son Safwan (Mick Wingert) .. At
least allegedly Dubai's first ever animated feature film (and I can
neither confirm nor denie it nor do I see any reason to do either), this
is actually so slick a movie that it does live up to comparison with
comparable fare from elsewhere, and does feature some breathtaking set
pieces. That said, Bilal is not a movie that reinvents epic
storytelling - some might say it follows the genre rules a bit too closely
even - but it does manage to keep the audience's interest up throughout,
does get bloody when it needs to, and especially for an historical,it's
just an incredibly tense movie To give this film it's proper
historical background: Bilal is a figure from Islamic
history and according to all accounts has done much good - and thus this movie has a very beautiful anti-slavery,
anti-racism, anti-sexism message to it, and basically says let's all get
along - and please please please, let's just all agree on this ..
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