Matt
Matt kept his five out of five, calling it one of his all-time top five Best Picture winners. He was in awe of the shots David Lean got, pre-CGI, with what he learned were thousands of Jordanian army extras and a shoot of more than 300 days across Jordan, Spain, and Morocco. He loved how the production returned to the actual locations, including trains still on the tracks from the original shoot decades earlier. He pointed to the match-cut from the blown-out flame to the rising desert sun as a standout, and to Lawrence's line about the trick being not minding that it hurts, tracking Lawrence's resolve crumbling as the film goes on. He also read the film as a meditation on imperialism: Lawrence helps lead the Arab Revolt and genuinely wants Arab independence, but in the end he's still part of the British power structure deciding the outcome from a distance.
Jeff
Jeff gave it a four out of five. He found it long and, at times, slow and overacted by Peter O'Toole, whose theater background shows. But he was struck by Lawrence's story arc: a young idealist who leads his soldiers to early victories and is beloved, then is captured and tortured and slowly loses his sense of self, a pattern he compared to Paths of Glory and the general World War I narrative of men entering the war as idealists and coming out hardened or broken. He singled out a line near the end, war is for young men and bargaining is for the old ones, and connected it to his own time as a classroom teacher versus the bigger-picture decisions made by school districts and states. He noted their grandma counted this among her favorite movies.