Cairo Magazine - Kingdom not quite come

Orlando Bloom lacks the star appeal to carry Ridley Scott's latest war epic, Kingdom of Heaven

Considering the press coverage given to the release of Kingdom of Heaven, Ridley Scott’s epic on the Crusades, one might think that the movie is a momentous event in the history of inter-civilizational relations. The film has been scrutinized by historians for its accuracy (which is generally sorely lacking), its ecumenism (rather bland) and its sensitivity to the current political context. One almost feels that one should go into the cinema with the Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades and Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations jammed between the popcorn and soda.

Kingdom of Heaven follows the story of Balian of Ibelin (Orlando Bloom), a lovelorn French blacksmith who turns out to be the bastard son of one of the leading knights defending the Kingdom of Jerusalem, Baron Godfrey of Ibelin. After losing his wife and murdering a priest in his native village, Balian embarks on a journey to Jerusalem to seek spiritual solace. He arrives there at a time of political crisis: the king, Baldwin IV (an excellent cameo by Edward Norton), is dying of leprosy and the Knights Templar, whose leader is married to his sister Sybilla (played by a sultry Eva Green), covet the throne to take the kingdom to war. In the meantime, Salah Eddin (a fine performance by Syrian actor Ghassan Massoud) has amassed an impressive army near Damascus, and only waits for the opportune moment to retake Jerusalem from the weakening Christians.

Although the reconquest of Jerusalem by Salah Eddin is the historical pivot of the film, many of the details have been changed to simplify the plot. The battle between Christian and Muslim for the Holy City is essentially replaced by a clash between religious fanaticism, represented by the Templars and one of Salah Eddin’s more gung-ho aides (the Mullah played by Egyptian actor Khaled Nebawy), and the politically correct, “can’t-we-all-get-along” agnosticism of Balian, Salah Eddin and their supporters. This is perhaps the greatest historical mistake of the film: it turns the key protagonists into advocates of a Star Trek-like world of tolerance and multi-culturalism. There is little doubt in this reviewer’s mind that Kingdom of Heaven would have been a much better film if it had focused on the violent passion, hunger for power and political intrigue that probably drove both Christians and Muslims during the Crusades.

“The film secularizes the conflict,” complains Khaled Aboul Fadl, a professor of Islamic Law at the University of California in Los Angeles. ”It gives the appearance that Balian was a secular man and so was Salah Eddin and this is why they were able to find peace. The fact is if Balian would have said half the things the movie attributed to him, he would have been shipped off to Rome to stand before the Inquisition and he would have been burned at the stake. In addition, contrary to the film’s claims, Salah Eddin was a deeply religious man and his morality emerged from his piety.”

Abou Fadl, in his capacity as expert on Islam, was given an early version of the script, which he says was full of factual inaccuracies and slurs against Muslims. Even the final version of the film, he says, portrays Arabs in a negative light—most often as servile or untrustworthy. On the other side of the fence, Riley Smith, a professor of ecclesiastical history at Cambridge University, has dubbed Kingdom of Heaven “Osama Bin Laden’s version of history.”

In fairness, there are legitimate gripes all around. Christians, especially the Templars, come out unfairly vilified in the film. The chief villain, Guy de Lusignan (Marton Csokas), did exist but was not a templar. In fact, the Knights Templar were not the fanatics they are portrayed as in this film. The Catholic Church as a whole also comes out badly in the film, with one priest righteously murdered and another, the craven Patriarch of Jerusalem, showing absolutely no backbone in the face of Muslim invaders (“Convert to Islam and repent later,” he advises Balian during the siege of Jerusalem, who answers “You’ve just taught me everything I need to know about religion.”)

Arabs (whether Muslim or Christian), come out as distinctly backward compared to their European counterparts. The vassals of Ibelin, for instance, do not think of digging a well to irrigate their parched land until Balian, after his unlikely transformation from scruffy blacksmith to nobleman, swordsman, strategist, engineer and moody agnostic, arrives to help them. Similarly, Balian and a handful of peasants manage to keep Salah Eddin’s army of 200,000 at bay for days before securing a honorable surrender. It is also bewildering that, considering all the advice the director must have received, the camera lingers on Orientalist scenes of Muslims praying during, rather than after, the azan (call to prayer).

But does any of this really matter? Both Christians and Muslims—and history—lose out in the end to a plot that might have been written by the Council for Secular Humanism. Scott did not particularly care to capture the morality of the era, and also plays around with the facts. This is fine, and we should be used to such things from Hollywood, which regularly falsifies history by turning foreign heroes into Americans (remember U-571, where the United States rather than Britain cracks the Nazis’ Enigma coding machine?)

What is less forgivable is that Kingdom of Heaven is rather pedestrian. With the sting removed from its religious polemics, we are left with Orlando Bloom as a lead actor with little star quality and secondary characters that steal the limelight (such as Edward Norton’s spooky, silver-masked leper king or Jeremy Irons’ patrician Tiberias). While the costumes, armor and sword fighting are well done, computer-generated warfare is far more impressive in the presumably less-advanced (by several years) an historical fare in the Lord of the Rings series— with the added plus that we didn’t have to learn anything from Lord of the Rings.

The era of the Crusades offers a rich tapestry of historical material for a movie not only about wars between Muslims and Christians, but also the countless small wars that pit Christian against Christian and Muslim against Muslim, as well as many interesting non-state groups such as the Knights Templar or the Hashashiyeen (the Assassins). It’s a shame that a director as capable as Scott chose to void Kingdom of Heaven of religious sentiment, for it also voids it of any sense of urgency about what his protagonists were trying to achieve.