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militant-holy-knight · 4 years

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Kingdom of Heaven Review: Secular Agnostic Humanist Crusader Edition

Whenever the topic of Ridley Scott’s 2005 movie Kingdom of Heaven comes up, it invariably brings up how it’s one of his most mediocre movies and that “the Director’s Cut is better”. This makes sense since the movie actually had a very mixed reception when it was first released on theaters, as critics lambasted the cliched plot and characters and overall being all style and no substance. As it turns out, several changes were made behind the scenes by executives who felt the movie ran too long and cut scenes they felt were appropriate, but actually improved the story.

I’ve heard so many people praising the Director’s Cut to the point they even said it was an “whole different movie”, which was very confusing to me, and made me wonder if they actually saw it and aren’t parroting someone else. Now don’t get me wrong: it’s true that the Director’s Cut is the superior version to the theatrical one and does fix issues like character motivations and actions, it doesn’t even come close to fixing the foundation which it was built on: an extremely politically-biased and revisionist distortion, product of someone molded by their own time period than anything else.

The characters have anachronistic attitudes that are out of place specially at the heart of an holy war. The sympathetic characters - whether Christians or Muslims - can be identified as secular humanists that express religious tolerance and would rather live and let live, whereas antagonistic characters are characterized by their religious fanaticism. Baldwin IV and Saladin would rather live in peace with each other, but are beleaguered by the circumstances of their followers who clamor for war. This portrayal couldn’t be more absurd and further from the truth because the “peace” between the Kingdom of Jerusalem and the Ayyubi Caliphate was not meant to last forever, but more until both sides regrouped and rearmed to resume hostilities like an armistice, not to mention the fact both monarchs were extremely pious in their faiths (Catholicism and Sunni Islam, respectively) and considered themselves their staunch defenders.

This is no accident. Ridley Scott is an agnostic and has admitted at multiple occasions that he used it as an opportunity to criticize religion. Perhaps the most illustrative moment where this attitude sweeps in is during the climax when Jerusalem is eventually besieged and Balian delivers an speech to the army that boils down to “Jerusalem belongs to everyone”, which simply wouldn’t fly with the Christians at the time. Consider in that era where even people of their own faiths struggled among each other (The Kingdom of Jerusalem was Latin Catholic and other Christians like Orthodox, Armenians and Copts were often regarded as schismatics, while Sunnis and Shias were at war with each other like they always do), can you imagine if someone actually said that in regards to other religions?!?

A particularly inconvenient aspect of the movie that is clear for everyone who sees it is that only the Christian side is the only one truly hit with the fanaticism issue, whereas Muslims comes off as cleaner. When you really come down to it, the crusader side is filled with more despicable villains who are named, whereas the Muslim side has one token nameless mullah who is an asshole to Saladin, threatening him that if he doesn’t give them Jerusalem, they will kill him and find someone who can - that is about the extent of his villainy. There is also a Saracen rider that wants to duel Balian at one point, but he is just some random threat thrown in, and it’s later revealed he was an slave masquerading as someone else.

Now compare this with Balian’s asshole priest brother who steals his wife’s crucifix, the slimy Patriarch of Jerusalem, and Guy of Gisborne and Raynald of Chatillon, both of whom are generic warmongers that just want to kill infidels for no reason, the former kills an emissary which constitutes as an offense worthy of Genghis Khan’s wrath while the latter rapes and kills Saladin’s sister. What makes this worse is that none of these are true: The Patriarch actually helped ransom people during the Siege of Jerusalem, Guy wasn’t particularly better or worse than his contemporaries and if anything, he was regarded as an weakling rather than a bloodthirsty thug, whereas Raynald never even attacked Saladin’s sister (according to Arab sources) and while he was still a very violent man, it was the result of being held 16 years in a prison under Muslims in Aleppo and in the end, he died like a Christian martyr to jihadist terrorism - being told by Saladin to convert to Islam or die, which he picked the latter.

You can tell when certain fedoralords say they hate religion actually hate Christianity only, and this is the tone that oozes from this movie. No wonder a historian once called this movie “al-Qaeda’s version of the story” because Christians commit horrible atrocities against innocent Muslims hence Muslim aggression by Saladin is justified. If anything Bin Laden likely envisioned himself as an modern-day Saladin, hoping to unite the Muslim world against the “Eternal Crusader”. The lionizing of Saladin is laughable given the fact that until recent memory he was an obscure figure on account of being Kurdish, but was co-opted by Arab Muslims as their hero. I wonder how would audiences feel that Saladin had half Jerusalem’s population enslaved which is something he actually did in real life instead of letting them go like in the movie.....

There are also other problems with the movie besides religion that even the Director’s Cut couldn’t fix like Balian’s character. I already went over how he is representative of the movies’s secular humanist themes, but there is a lot more wrong with him beyond that. Simply put, he is the most vanilla flavor protagonist, devoid of charisma or flaws, and comes across as a Marty Stu when you think about it: a nobody who is revealed to be the bastard son of some crusader baron that just so happens to be influential enough with Jerusalem’s nobility that everyone good immediately befriends him. He has a tragic backstory that makes him an atheist, but is perfect and devoid of any flaws and is written in such way that serves as a surrogate for the audience. By contrast, his historical counterpart was a knight born and raised in Jerusalem who was actually devout and politically shrewd, which comes across as more interesting and Arab Muslims agreed since they wrote “he was like a king”. But nope. Can’t have that because Balian is actually Scott’s self-insert by his own admission and we can’t have a guy like real-life Balian because modern audiences can’t identify with him.

Scott seriously misunderstood the Knight Templars. Naturally like our lead villains they are also genocidal maniacs, but also appear to be a secular noble/warrior class of some kind since Guy and Raynald are affiliated with them (they weren’t in real life), and it’s a plot point that Guy is engaged with Baldwin’s sister Princess Sybilla. Templars made vows of chastity and poverty, schewing all property and titles so it makes no sense for either of them being part of the order, much less for a Templar to become king. (Afonso Henriques of Portugal was at least a former Templar).

And then there are the geo-politics... Even though Scott denied that the movie was an metaphor, it certainly comes across this way with characters talking about how much wealth they made from the campaigns as if this was the American intervention in the Middle-East for oil. Jerusalem had no resources, no real treasures except maybe the True Cross which had great emotional value for the Christians and in fact, it was the other way around: it was far more expensive, having to secure resources, armor and weaponry to join the crusade with the likely risk of death with no returning home with the only comfort being remission of sins in case of falling in battle.

The Crusades were precipitated by Muslim aggression in the first place, namely the Seljuk Turks who crushed the Byzantine Empire in the Battle of Mazinkert and began persecuting Christian pilgrims in the Holy Land, not to mention the subhuman conditions that Eastern Christians found themselves as dhimmis under Islamic rule. When framed this manner, the wrath of Latin Catholics hearing the atrocities carried out by the Turks is quite justified. Could Scott himself say this is justified compared to how much Muslim caravans were attacked by Templars on his movie?

So to sum things up: we have liberal political bias that portrays one side as the assholes while the others justified in retaliating, a perfect protagonist that is clearly a self-insert, generic villains that are evil for no reason other than being Christian, historical inaccuracies, white-washing certain figures while removing all nuance and depth from others, honestly embarrassing analogies with modern topics that stick out like a sore thumb. And in the end, for you to walk away with not much. I am sorry but even the Director’s Edition didn’t make things significantly better because the movie’s issues lies at their conceptual form: Balian is still a Marty Stu, the Christians are largely one-dimensional evil, the Muslims are honorable and enlightened, etc. You can’t make a story engaging when the setting is revolving around religious conflict and the leads are all secularists, or else it shows how much “smarter than thou” attitude you have.

I’ve heard about how Scott got into a spat with the British historian community who made very clear how his movie was bollocks. A common defense on his behalf is that he isn’t obligated to tell history like how it was and he made the movie he felt best, which is honestly just baffling because it’s very insulting towards the audience. I am not saying that the audience should be challenged (at least not in a Rian Johnson way), but imagine if Raynald’s captivity was brought up and his death was portrayed in redemptive fashion after all his atrocities, imagine Saladin preaching jihad against the crusaders, imagine Balian breaking his oath, etc. Now that would have made an more memorable movie instead of the one who is remembered for his slightly better version released separately. Certainly history had a better story to tell than Ridley Scott.

Like what Amin Maalouf, author of “The Crusades through Arab Eyes” once said.

It does not do any good to distort history, even if you believe you are distorting it in a good way. Cruelty was not on one side but on all.

#history #rants #reviews

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