Some pointers on Anglo-Saxons and Normans
The review of this film by user "altquark" intrigued me as an example of the kinds of falsehoods that used to be perpetrated in history lessons in the UK, and then innocently repeated by those who had absorbed them, like altquark. Since this is a sidenote to any consideration of the film itself, they're probably better mentioned here than in a review. So taking a few of his or her specific assertions, in no particular order:
1) The Normans were not French. They were Danes who had ripped a portion of coastal France from the French in 911 and settled there, becoming Christianized and French-speaking over the following century. But they didn't consider themselves French, and the French didn't regain control of Normandy for three hundred years (until 1204).
2) Far from being merely "a number of warring shires" before the Norman invasion, England had been a unified nation-state since the 920s (when Athelstan completed the re-conquest of the Danelaw begun by his grandfather Alfred the Great and his father Edward the Elder). Athelstan and his successors in the house of Wessex were every bit as much Kings of England as the Normans.
3) Far from being "integrated with the Anglo-Saxons within one lifetime", the Normans pretty much made sure they married only within their own ranks for more than three centuries -- they had to, since as a tiny minority (no more than 10,000 of them, including all the soldiers who fought at Hastings) it was the only way they could ensure the land they had appropriated didn't pass out of their control though inheritance. It's worth remembering that after Harold II, no king of England was primarily an English-speaker again until Henry IV, who came to power in 1399 -- a dozen generations after the conquest.
4) Far from "all technology, tools and foundations of defense stemming directly from the invader", the English were just as technologically advanced as the Normans. What they were not, however, was a thoroughly militarized society kept on a permanent war footing by constant skirmishing with the French. The English rank and file were farmers on rotating military duty -- their main work was arable and pastoral farming, which provided the strong economic base that made England such a tempting target for the Normans and Vikings in the first place. The main innovation the Normans brought to England was brutalist military architecture (such as the White Tower in the Tower of London) -- a fitting embodiment of the mindset of an outnumbered occupying force always aware that their presence was unwanted and could be maintained only by force. In all the arts of civil society -- government administration, coinage and taxation, record-keeping (in their own language as well as Latin) and art, the English were streets ahead of the Normans. Even in ecclesiastical architecture, the Normans could only impose their stamp by systematically demolishing all the English cathedrals and replacing them with their own.
The Norman propaganda machine -- whose purpose for the past 900 years has been to legitimize the continuing power and wealth of the Norman-descended aristocracy -- has been remarkably successful in obliterating everything that came before them from memory, or at least from our educational system, as witness the outright falsehoods and more subtle innuendos perpetrated in the history lessons altquark was subjected to. (And altquark is in exalted company: in his "History of Britain" even Simon Schama, who ought to know better, treated everything before 1066 as mere prequel, to be got through in one episode before the main feature started.)