A movie shot more for entertainment purposes than any historical verisimilitude, Kingdom of Heaven features an excellent cinematography, with very appealing shots of the desert and of Jerusalem, both having been recreated in Morocco, but little else…
Loosely based on the story of a real man, Balian, a blacksmith who finds himself the bastard son of a noble and decides to follow his father to Jerusalem, where he plans to save his dead wife’s soul and his own as well. Kingdom of Heaven could have been a lot more interesting if it had been kept as an action movie about the wars surrounding the kingdom of Jerusalem and the crusades. Instead there’s a lot of moral advice and philosophical considerations about men, religion and war. Balian is forever speaking of his moral conscience and following a code of behaviour that was just too clean to be believable. His vision of God and his relation with Him ends up being highly anachronistic and falls into some sort of caricature. One feels that not only the lack of historical accuracy but everything is excessive and the overly romanticised black and white view of the events bored us to tears.
With just a few traces left of the real history behind the last days of the kingdom of Jerusalem and the reclaiming of the city by Saladin, Kingdom of Heaven is mainly a feast for the eyes with all the attention given to the settings. The cast has some interesting names like Jeremy Irons, Liam Neeson and Edward Norton (who was just great as the leper king!). The movie features also Orlando Bloom as Balian (a casting mistake, in our opinion) and the gorgeous Eva Green as Queen Sybilla of Jerusalem.
It was an alright movie. Could have been better.
I’m actually quite fond of this movie. I highly recommend seeing the extended director’s cut version. The theatrical release of the film was butchered for time constraint and the director’s cut features almost an hour of cut scenes. Some of these are extremely important to the plot and meaning of the film. Anyone who has only seen the theatrical release really hasn’t seen the movie at all!