Kingdom of Heaven

Kingdom of Heaven

It is after four years when President Bush described war against terrorism as a crusade, and then, much to the embarrassment of a liberal west, he tried to retract back into his throat. The attention the audience in a coon skin cap would demonstrate towards a ridge line has been captured in this venerable William Wallace picture perhaps for the first time ever.

Kingdom of Heaven has apparently a secondary title, which is “from the director of Gladiator,” and this title can be read on all of those vignette posters. If cloning were available, and those clones were brainwashed into believing the British Empire was right, and there was a civil or colonial campaign supporting this, you would still need someone with actual talent to play one of the main roles.

In actual fact, it is an adaptation in a romantic liberal style devoted to the crusades and many of the writers’ parts are extremely dispersive, where a character Orlando Bloom is a 12th century European smith who comes to Jerusalem not to spread Christianity and restore the honor of the Christendom, but rather to unite Muslims and Christians in a loving multi-religion community.

With nearly all religions and their practitioners receiving the appropriate respect, there is only one notable exception which happens to be the Vatican. For example, one could point to the Papal representative who is humiliated. He endorses the Templar extremists’ killing of innocents, and when faced with Saladin’s siege, he shamelessly advises a people to renounce Christianity and later regret it. Regret? Who cares. Eventually, it seems that all have been influenced by the universal culture of humanism.

In medieval France, Bloom plays the blacksmith Balian. He mops around in close-fitting jerkins adorned with black and whines, having just lost his child and now his wife to suicide. A scruffy old soldier rides into his village searching for the smith, and unfortunately for him, Balian happens to be his illegitimate son. This would be the Liam Neeson character who accuses Balian of being noble and asks him to come with him on the Crusade.

Initially baffled and enraged, Balian eventually chases him, thinking making a holy prayer over his dead wife will prevent her from hell for ever. On the trip, he overnight matures. He becomes a knight, an able soldier and (out of nowhere) talented tactician, a lover and dreamer of world without Wars. In the desert, Balian shares a William Lawrence moment of brotherhood and respect with a Saracenic warrior who comes to him sans the irritative gallop across shimmery sand.

The picture swiftly makes a distinction between good Christians, in the form of compassionate, selfless Bloom, and bad, thoroughly destructive and two dimensional Christians, like the hyena-like Templars hell bent on obliterating the Muslim world. The main villain is Sir Guy De Lusignan who is portrayed by Marton Csokas, and there has to be more than a few in the gay circles who would be envious of how girly he is forever sneering and nursing a pout while striking all kinds of condescending catwalk stances.

He’s a mix of Larry Grayson and the devil, plus the pervert from Hannibal’s basement who danced in a leotard with his penis between his thighs. Sir Guy is what he is because he is the brother of peaceable King Baldwin (Ed Norton), who is married to Sibylla (Eva Green), who was last seen in Bertolucci’s The Dreamers.

During the time when the Crusaders waged war against Salah Ad-din, Balian, with his charm and elegance, was able to capture the heart of the beautiful and strong-willed Sibylla. However, sexual lust for her is not the only thing that moves him. She constantly rides in and out of courtyards, dressed like a lady from some foreign exotic land, who wraps, and unbreathiest, and is kind of like a weird aristocrat who is about to take an axe to frosty Turkish delight. All of that is restrained and conquered in her exquisite voice.

With his acting performance, Jeremy Irons adds even more whimsy, and on the thesp-o-meter, he goes off the charts. The king’s aide Tiberias follows in earnest as he tries to maintain the balance in relations with the Muslim countries surrounding the city. There is something a bit conflicting about his wider appearance however. His hair is famously short, he wears sunglasses to conceal the huge scar on his right eye, his accent is low and throaty, and there is something odd about the way he grooves about town like an angsty Darth Vader.

When the primary confrontation begins, which culminates in an enormous assault on Jerusalem featuring countless pixelated troops amassed on an artificial plain, we at least receive the sense that action is taking place which partially counteracts the ambiguity that has been gradually seeping into this film since the opening blue. Maybe the siege scene can not be at par with the hordes of orcs in the Lord of the Rings, or even Brad Pitt striking the battle in Troy, but finally the directions of the battle and the icons of the story are somewhat more defined.

Like the rest of the film, in this black galliard has wretched the same device in Scott’s Black Hawk Down, try to come to terms with a violent military venture, while devoid of the courage to make our heroes look bad which is not an option. Same here, any film with returning crusaders must grapple with the image of Max Von Sydow returning home in The Seventh Seal.

Nobody is obligated, for example, to recreate the nuclear winter of disillusion which Bergman constructed and while trying to achieve some sort of balance between Christianity and Islam is not a dead aim for the film-maker, it does seem rather naïve. However, everything about it is so jaded and somewhat childlike, and its Muslim audiences might well feel ambivalent about how such a fictional good guy crusader portrays himself as some sort of heroic figure doing the right thing at all times.

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