Scripters Shekhar Kapur and Michael Schiffer in a letter to the New York Times editor state that "The Four Feathers" was made because we view world differently now from the way the audience of 1939 did. They maintain that they are bringing a strong, anti-colonialist point of view to the story which "allows us to bring new focus and awareness to a conflict of cultures, which has endured for the last 100 years."

The current production reinterprets Zoltan Korda's 1939 film which put John Clements, Ralph Richardson and C. Aubrey Smith in the starring roles itself remade by Korda in 1955 as "Storm Over the Nile." Whether individuals in the audience today will see the visually resplendent feature by Shekhar Kapur ("Elizabeth") as pro-British or pro- Sudanese is an open question, since the case against imperialism is muted in favor no-holds-barred battle sequences and the magnificence of the southern Moroccan desert where the filming took place.

Paramount Pictures is releasing "The Four Feathers" coincidentally at about the time that a re-digitalized "Lawrence of Arabia" is scheduled to make its presence felt to a new, young audience. The major difference between the two what makes Peter O'Toole's Lawrence a more compelling figure than Heath Ledger's Harry is that Harry's character is glossed over in favor of action while that of Lawrence is, to a mature audience, the most compelling aspect of the Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson screenplay for the David Lean classic.

Nonetheless, "The Four Feathers" is an eyeful, giving us in the audience not only a view of some terrific costumes and disciplined troops (many of whom are actual recruits in the British army) but lots of gorgeous scenery in the person of Kate Hudson, who as Ethne is caught in a triangular romance of epic proportions.

The action begins on the rugby field, where a contingent of Redcoats, bored without a war to fight, takes out its aggressions on the rugby field. When the command is given to leave in a week for the Sudan to rescue their fellows who are besieged in a Khartoum fort, all the men are deliriously happy, except for Harry (Heath Ledger), who has announced his troth to the fair Ethne and is horny enough to want to have a go at her rather than at the "wogs" in North Africa. Oh, and also he questions what the queen wants with a hellhole like Sudan a query explained in part when the local reverend urged the men to head south to civilize the heathens. When Harry resigns his army commission days before the men are to pull out, he is given four feathers by his four best friends (including his gal) symbolizing his cowardice. Harry's resignation from the army turns Ethne away from him: she begins to fancy Harry's more heroic friend, Jack (Wes Bentley), a fifth wheel who had envied Harry's relationship with Ethne and is now in position to trump him.

Like Michael Bay's "Pearl Harbor," Shekhar Kapur's epic mixes romance with war, but unlike the Bay film the battle scenes take precedence over the romance perhaps because the action takes place in Victorian times when honor calls for waiting until marriage and because there are no parachutes available for lovers to get it on. The scenes in the Sudan look not unlike the mayhem of battle in Ridley Scott's "Black Hawk Down," but complexity arrives when a black mercenary, Abou Fatma (Djimon Hounsou), makes friends with Harry and commits himself to protecting him, the cowardly Brit having made a volte force to goes alone into the desert dressed as an Arab to spy for the British and rescue his friends.

Some of the battle scenes recall the days of the American West, when the cavalry would ride up at the last moment to trounce the Indians who are about to slaughter every last white man. The most effective scenes are taken apparently from the back of a camel or a horse: the sands part as the warriors storm the desert eager for hand-to-hand combat. One particularly effective scene shows the Sudanese tribesmen in effect ambushing the British force albeit in the wide-open spaces of the desert by having buried themselves in the sand and rising up as the enemy horses are virtually on top of them.

Somehow classic western-style scenes have gone out of fashion. "The Four Feathers" is good enough to represent the beginning of a new trend. While the production notes state that the action a century and a quarter ago is relevant to the present because it conjures up themes of patriotism, honor and loyalty to one's friends, the film does even more. This could make Americans and in fact people throughout Western Europe and the Middle East think harder about the ethics and practicalities of making a preemptive strike into Iraq where they would be looked upon as imperialistic as were the British in the 19th Century.