"His Triumph Changed The World Forever," advertising copy exclaims but for all of Gandhi's scale and quality the second tagline reading, "The Man of the Century. The Motion Picture of a Lifetime," rings somehow false. Perhaps it's because director Richard Attenborough's life's work and culminating movie masterpiece is so obviously, so totally, so inescapably in the tradition of old Hollywood screen classics that it's partially out-of-touch with audiences. Perhaps it's because we already know the movie's ending since it is, after all, a biopic about an assassinated public figure. Perhaps it's because Gandhi won the Best Picture Oscar in a year that also saw Academy Award nominations for Best Picture fall to ET and Tootsie along with an announcement of coming stardom from Australia in the Mel Gibson vehicle The Road Warrior.

Regardless, Gandhi is an excellent film though I challenge anyone to be interested in watching it a second time when considering its length and impact that remains impressive though nonetheless unexciting. Not to say it's empty of engaging moments, wonderful performances and scenes with thematic resonance. Instead Gandhi is that type of well-crafted art every society seems capable of producing because it seems to epitomize excellence even if it also disregards more memorable and revolutionary sparks of originality.

In its sweeping account of the life and times of Mohandas K. Gandhi from his rise as a feisty, Western-educated lawyer through his installation as India's leader and worldwide symbol of peace, Gandhi remains uniformly fixed on studying this now-legendary figure within the frame of his life. That his life was brought to an unnatural conclusion after years of resistance to the wars between nation states and the rising climate of man's inhumanity against man means his life is served as an example as much as it's meant to entertain us.

Implicitly Gandhi balances this connection between social instruction and mass entertainment through his on-screen personification in the stunning performance of Ben Kingsley. The actor's version of the Indian leader is dead-on accurate with a physical likeness bearing close resemblance to the historical man while also being somehow at odds with the conventional screen hero. How refreshing, how remarkable, how nice is Kingsley's performance in comparison to other movie phenomena like Indiana Jones whose early 1980s adventures told of a radically different screen protagonist in a time lorded over by Reagan and the musical chairs leadership of the Soviet Republic.

Of course the historical Gandhi's critics have been largely silenced in favor of beatifying the man and the choice martyrs the movie like its inspirational source. To complain of Gandhi's historical inaccuracies, though, to detest or enjoy its celebrity cameos including Martin Sheen, Candice Bergen, John Gielgud and the then-unknown George Ratzenberger and Daniel Day-Lewis, to be silent in light of its sweeping historical drama or to be indifferent to its lessons is beyond the pall of polite consideration.

Gandhi is a prestige picture centered on an unassailable historical figure. It is also the peak of Richard Attenborough's career after a long list of contributions to the cinemas of both Britain and America as both an actor and filmmaker. And it's the epic-style movie debut of Kingsley who quite literally bore the movie on his thinning shoulders with a turn of skill and humanity totally without comparison, that year's noble work by Paul Newman in The Verdict and Dustin Hoffman's comic turn in Tootsie included.

Kingsley's Gandhi is one of the great movie roles although the part remains outside the usual vein of motion picture action and reaction. Historical Gandhi's insistence on simplicity, purity and devotion are traits plotted across time and lack the kind of punch so necessary to cinematic adventures and action sequences. Much of his biopic is consumed with giving space for these more philosophical considerations even as the movie itself moves through some of the grandest set pieces in cinematic history, at least from the standpoint of human masses on-screen if not in the use of special effects.

This switching from character driven, almost theatrical, scenes to the more bombastic and exciting sequences involving crowds and geo-political crises is the divide upon which the film splits. In the resulting gap lies the consideration of filmmakers translating a long life of conduct and leadership into big screen heroism without the usual devotion to bullets and blondes.

Since I come from the extended childhood of serial movie watching, ancillary markets tie-ins, action figures and media penetration into all aspects of waking life, I'm not a big fan of highly produced movies on elevated subjects. Instead I'm interested in excitement, without relying on coarse vulgarity, provocation though not without motivation, complexity with clear direction and I crave surprising originality at every turn.

While it's difficult to feel frustration or disgust with Attenborough's film, it's also fair to say that seeing it one time is enough. Kingsley's performance is key. The direction is assured. Supporting performers are first rate. Production design is top notch. Altogether the effect is impressive rather than exciting, educational rather than provocative, simplistic rather than complex and totally unsurprising from the word go.

Not all of these tendencies are unique to Gandhi. Yet the opposite tendencies are everywhere true in characterizing ET that remains more eminently representative of 1982 even if the Academy Award went to Attenborough's exacting study of one of the twentieth century's most luminous characters.