On his way back to the Holy Land, a Crusader named Godfrey of Ibelin (Liam Neeson), pauses in France to invite the bastard son he has never known, a blacksmith named Balian (Orlando Bloom), to accompany him. The year is 1184, a few decades after the conclusion of the Second Crusade and not long before the Muslim recapture of Jerusalem that would provoke the Third. In Kingdom of Heaven, Scott tries to assume both stances at once, a schizophrenia of purpose that renders the film a moral muddle, if occasionally a revealing one. It seems no coincidence that the movie is directed by Ridley Scott, whose two previous martial exertions, Black Hawk Down and Gladiator, took skeptical and romantic views of battle, respectively. Has a historical epic ever told us less about the milieu in which it is set, and more about that in which it was produced, than Kingdom of Heaven? An exuberant war movie that is also a laughably ahistorical anti-war polemic, the film is an exceptional example of what happens when Hollywood's commercial and political imperatives crash headlong into one another.
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