Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages Movie Review

Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages (1916)

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Written by: Hettie Grey Baker, D.W. Griffith, Mary H. O'Connor, Frank E. Woods (titles, uncredited), Tod Browning (uncredited), D.W. Griffith (scenario), Anita Loos (titles), Walt Whitman (poem "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking", uncredited)  
Directed by: D.W. Griffith
Starring: Lillian Gish, Douglas Fairbanks, Spottiswoode Aitken 
Rated: --
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Plot
Four stories with common themes depict the cruelty and intolerance against love and charity. The stories depict the fall of Babylon, Christ's crucifixion, the St. Bartholomew's massacre in France, and the love story of a man and woman.

Verdict
The scale and scope is crazy. A movie with a production this big even today would be impressive. The story is interesting, but a silent film is a chore to sit through. It's a movie for film students, not for pure entertainment. I wouldn't want to watch it again. The technical achievement does not overcome the antiquated format.
Skip it.

Review
This movie was  D.W. Griffith's response to the backlash his previous film Birth of a Nation received. The backlash was warranted as Birth of a Nation is racist trash. I don't know whether Griffith is arguing that his viewpoint (assuming it's his viewpoint) should be tolerated or whether he has a right to tell a story no matter how vile it is. I don't really care either.

Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages - Impressive scale and scope.

This movie's defining characteristic is it's massive scale. The main plot is a boy and girl that fall in love, but are separated for various reasons. The other stories are variations on the theme. The fall of Babylon is amazing to see. There are hundreds of people on screen, a huge castle, siege towers. Seeing something like this done practically in a movie today would be crazy, much less done one hundred years ago. While the scale is staggering, it is short on story.

The movie is complex, and by that I mean confusing. I admit my attention began to wander, but that's the movie's fault as is it's confusing narrative. The world has created better movies since this one.