Sadly, holy wars have a tendency to attract all types, including a few who actually believe in God and in warfare. Indeed, religious tolerance is so nearly ubiquitous that one might infer that the Crusaders' purpose was not conquest or conversion, but rather an early experiment in multicultural integration, a twelfth-century precursor of busing. Godfrey, too, shared this liberal mindset before his death, as does his surviving aide-de-camp (David Thewlis). The leprous King of Jerusalem (Edward Norton, hiding behind a gilt mask), his sister Sybella (Eva Green), and his chief adviser Tiberius (Jeremy Irons) are all skeptical humanists eager to get along with their Muslim neighbors. Balian kills one of them and lets the other go free, ensuring that when he arrives in Jerusalem he will be welcomed as a famously peaceable Crusader. Shortly thereafter, a pair of Arabs try to take the horse from him. His companions all die along the way: Some (including Godfrey) succumb to wounds suffered in defending Balian from capture the rest perish in a shipwreck.īalian himself survives, however, awakening on a strange shore with his possessions intact and a conveniently unscathed horse tethered to a bit of flotsam nearby. Balian demurs at first, but after he murders a priest who insulted his dead wife he decides that relocating a couple thousand miles to the southeast is perhaps not such a bad idea after all. On his way back to the Holy Land, a Crusader named Godfrey of Ibelin (Liam Neeson), pauses in France to invite the bastard son he has never known, a blacksmith named Balian (Orlando Bloom), to accompany him. The year is 1184, a few decades after the conclusion of the Second Crusade and not long before the Muslim recapture of Jerusalem that would provoke the Third. In Kingdom of Heaven, Scott tries to assume both stances at once, a schizophrenia of purpose that renders the film a moral muddle, if occasionally a revealing one.
WATCH KINGDOM OF HEAVEN MOVIE
It seems no coincidence that the movie is directed by Ridley Scott, whose two previous martial exertions, Black Hawk Down and Gladiator, took skeptical and romantic views of battle, respectively. Has a historical epic ever told us less about the milieu in which it is set, and more about that in which it was produced, than Kingdom of Heaven? An exuberant war movie that is also a laughably ahistorical anti-war polemic, the film is an exceptional example of what happens when Hollywood's commercial and political imperatives crash headlong into one another.