It’s spectacle with the personal touch, focused on chivalry and ethics, ideas and rationality even as it moves through the historical crusades. This means religion and politics are dealt with unemotionally and the fanatics on all sides are shown for what they are, greedy trouble-making opportunists.
Superb battle scenes balance concise speeches that reveal character and insights into the situations. It’s psychologically accurate even as it compresses certain events and creates composites of certain characters to preserve narrative continuity. That religionists will balk is a given. That historians will nit-pick is a given. What matters is how this film places our current situation into context. We see how deep the roots go, and also how pointless they’ve always been, how base and banal and meaningless.
It’s a Zen movie. By that I mean that almost all the personal choices emphasized by Orlando Bloom’s character, Belian the Blacksmith, are straight out of Zen Buddhist thought. From simplicity in life to right action, to mindfulness, to defending the helpless and helping the downtrodden, it hearkens to a more basic philosophy that makes a mockery of the high-flown religions stirring up all the trouble. Speak the truth even if it means your own death; in this precept the behavior and words of the religionists crumble to nothing. Making things better equates with lessening suffering when and where we can; it’s a Zen movie.
This is to say the tenets of so-called Christian chivalry, which were written 50 years after Muslim leader Saladin’s death, (and featuring Saladin as their exemplar of an honorable, magnanimous knight), equate with those of Zen, which also arose from a martial application of stripped-down ideals. Zen Buddhism was tailored for the Samurai, who brooked no nonsense, and who lived lives a choice at a time.
That KINGDOM OF HEAVEN is a unified work of art with a single theme and solid connective tissues binding its framework into a working, living whole is a remarkable achievement given that no sentimentality, faux patriotism, or pleas to bigotry are present in the film. Ridley Scott has made a thinking person’s epic and a thoughtful study of rationality, based on William Monahan’s script. Orlando Bloom becomes a bona fide movie star with this one, proving he can not only carry an epic film, but illuminate it with subtle acting and convincing heroics. The supporting cast, from Liam Neeson as Belian’s surprise father, Godfrey, to Jeremy Irons as the embattled Marshall of Jerusalem, Tiberias, who is badgered on all sides by angry fanatic Christians and surly, resentful Muslims even as he’s caught between them and the king’s wish to maintain the peace, is exemplary. Edward Norton, behind the leper king’s silver mask, is sly and astute, while Syrian actor Ghassan Massoud, is magnificent as Saladin, leader of the Muslims.
As to the battle scenes, which many focus on to avoid talking much about the rational approach to religion, politics, and war presented in the movie, they are sharply observed, creative, and visually stunning. You feel the impact, you see the devastation of period weapons, and the siege, featuring huge trebuchets and seige towers, is presented both tactically, from Belian’s preparations and active defenses, and strategically, from Saladin’s perspective of certain victory by overwhelming numbers. Each battle scene underscores a different aspect of the period’s war style, from horses as armored cavalry to boiling pitch set ablaze as ancient napalm. Bombs whizzing in and exploding haven’t changed much, either, since the 12th Century.
See this film before it’s suppressed by the ideology police and theocratic loons currently, and criminally, in charge. See this film before it’s marginalized and minimalized by cheap lies about its content or about Mr. Scott’s politics. See this film before it’s relegated to a has-been by the next mindless sop to bigotry and stupidity. This isn’t a war movie to rouse the audience and make them feel validated. It’s that rarest of war movies, one that tries to make the audience think.
For that noble, doomed effort one must stand and applaud.
–Gene Stewart, 8 May 2005
/// /// ///
