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In France, 1184, Balian (Orlando Bloom), a blacksmith mourns his wife's death—a suicide case
following the death of their infant son. Then, into his dark days in the smithy comes a Crusader, Baron Godfrey of Ibelin (Liam Neeson) who reveals himself as Balian's
father. Partly to make up for his neglect, Godfrey tries to recruit Balian, offering him a new life in Jerusalem. Proud and grieving, Balian declines his father's
offer, until after he kills a priest and needs to run away and hide. To atone for his sins Balian agrees to join Godfrey on the journey to Jerusalem, but the older man is
mortally wounded in a battle on the road to Messina, and before he succumbs to the infection from his injury, he knights Balian and confers upon him his own title, Baron of
Ibelin. Balian survives a shipwreck and reaches Jerusalem months later. Meanwhile, around Jerusalem, the Arab leader Salahudin (Ghassan Massoud), backed by an army of
200,000 men, is plotting to reclaim Jerusalem from the Christians who have occupied it for 100 years.
In his first dramatically weighty role, Orlando Bloom gives a performance that is more than
adequate, but is less than earth-shaking. Kingdom of Heaven
boasts of a great cast and grand-scale moviemaking. Cinematography is such that the ghastliness of the whole business—the human carnage, the violence and the gore of that tragic swath of history—gets lacquered over by the aesthetic brilliance of each frame. Despite the slaughter, the divine is almost palpable in the film's visual grandeur. Particularly in the siege of Jerusalem, when the earth is blackened by thousands of bloodthirsty men in hand-to-hand combat as black smoke from the burning city glides in slow-mo across the breathtakingly blue sky, you could be forgiven for thinking that a sky this blue can convert atheists. Cinematographer John Mathieson definitely did his homework.
Considering the conflicts between Muslims and Christians still going on in the world today,
producing Kingdom of Heaven
must have been a monumental challenge to its director Ridley Scott and writer William Monahan. There's always that possibility of offending either side by an unfair portrayal of history, the film being a story on the Crusades, that period when the fervent Western civilization, brandishing sword and cross while fired up by cultural arrogance, confronted the Muslims. Monahan could have deliberately inserted fiction—the romance between Balian and Sybilla, among other altered historical data—in order that the viewer may not swallow the movie as a documentary. It seems ironic that Scott is trying to preach tolerance through a story set in one of the most intolerant eras of history, but he does succeed in planting in the heart of the story the values of honor, forgiveness, mutual respect and understanding as antidotes to war and bloodbath. Besides stating a fact that in the Muslim-Christian conflict it was the Christians who fired the first shot, so to speak,
Kingdom of Heaven also subtly reminds us that those who do not learn from history are destined to repeat it.
(Date Reviewed: 6 May 2005)
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