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Kingdom of Heaven
Just what the world needs right now, a film about the crusades… and from Ridley Scott, the man who made Gladiator and Black Hawk Down. You detect sarcasm in my words, but I'm half serious. After all, why shouldn't filmmakers address history's longest running sore? Whatever liberties Scott and screenwriter William Monahan may have taken with the historical record circa 1185 AD, as a drama, Kingdom of Heaven turns out to be a responsible and judicious appraisal of the tensions between Christian and Muslim fundamentalists. 
Scott has an agenda here, and a very welcome one. Against all expectations, he's fashioned an anti-clerical crusades epic. Near enough anti-imperialist too, but we'll get to that… Let's begin by noting that the film's first act of violence is committed on the corpse of a suicide, beheaded on the orders of a priest. The second is the righteous murder of that priest, barbecued by the dead woman's furious widower, a French blacksmith by the name of Balian (Orlando Bloom).
Now, history tells us Balian was a nobleman, but for Scott's purposes he's the illegitimate heir to Baron Godfrey of Ibelin (Liam Neeson), a working class hero who journeys to the Holy Land in search of expiation. In this 'new world' he finds the ruling Christians divided between two camps: those who believe in King Baldwin's philosophy of harmonious co-existence, and an extremist Papal faction, the Knights Templar, itching to incite all-out war with the infidel. 
The characterisation of these worthies as barbarous glory-seekers will hardly commend the film to the born-again contingent. Nor will they find solace in the cowardly, callous Roman Bishop (Jon Finch) who urges Balian to save their skins by sacrificing the citizens of Jerusalem, and later suggests it would be expedient to convert to Islam and repent at leisure. Balian, by contrast, emerges a man of impeccable integrity, 'the perfect knight'. But in this pilgrim's regress, his shaky faith hardens into something like agnosticism as the movie progresses. At the same time, with his nicely trimmed beard and backlit, shoulder-length locks he takes on a positively messianic halo. Heck, he even brings water to the desert. Is this Scott's answer to Mel Gibson's evangelical Jesus? His anti-Christ? In truth, the transformation of this simple artisan into a master strategist and invincible swordsman is laid on pretty thick, but you can't argue with his emancipatory rhetoric. In ceding the city of Jerusalem to the Saracens, Balian's dismissive of the shrine(s), but a good shepherd to the people who live within its walls. 
To be sure it's bombastic and over-blown– though no more so than Gladiator before it – but Kingdom of Heaven harps on this idea, this ideal of Jerusalem with tremendous conviction. I don't know if it's been acknowledged anywhere, but I'll bet that as a good working class Brit, Scott has taken his inspiration from William Blake's stirring hymn, a socialist anthem which evokes Jerusalem not as a place, but as a pre- (and post?) industrial paradise: 'And did the countenance divine/Shine forth upon our clouded hills/And was Jerusalem builded there/Among those dark satanic mills… I will not cease from mental fight/Nor shall my sword sleep in hand/Til we have built Jerusalem/In England's green and pleasant land…' Impressively mounted as you'd expect, Kingdom of Heaven is as definitive a piece of myth-mongering as Oliver Stone's Alexander was conflicted and confused. For a director who isn't known as a great communicator with actors, Scott at least has a great knack for assembling strong casts from top to bottom, and this is no exception (at last Orlando Bloom looks like a leading man, even if he's expertly upstaged by David Thewlis, Kevin McKidd, Jeremy Irons etc). And he keeps things moving right along too… a breathtakingly rendered shipwreck is allowed less than a minute's screen-time, and he boldly skips one cataclysmic battle scene altogether. (I wonder if it will show up on the DVD?) 
His handling of the love story is less compelling. Eva Green flounders between the character's avowed strength and her singularly passive role in the story. And though CGI allows the filmmaker to conjure armies thousands-strong, the detailing is still disappointingly sloppy when it comes to slapping on a flock of buzzards, say, feasting on the troops' carrion. Kingdom of Heaven opens this Friday in the UK, North America, and across Europe, but as you read this it's already playing in Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, Singapore, Indonesia, Egypt and in Israel. As I was saying: a Ridley Scott film about the crusades, it's what the world needs now… Tom Charity 
More information about Kingdom of Heaven » Critics' Reviews
Halliwell's Film Guide
An epic that is designed to throw liberal amounts of light on present day conflicts, which remains its weakness, since it regards the past through the wrong end of a telescope. There are compensations in some muscular battle scenes, but the movie occupies Time Out After the neo-colonialist heroics of Black Hawk Down, you might have expected another shock and awe job... read more on www.timeout.com News Of The World Make no mistake this is a genuine must see movie Members' ReviewsReviews Voted Most HelpfulMost Recent Reviews |