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Kingdom of Heaven
Things I don't like: War. Religion. Orlando Bloom's acting. Oh boy, I think I'm going to enjoy Kingdom of Heaven about as much as the Surprise Surprise Christmas Special.
I enjoyed this film: I think the average moviegoer will enjoy it: Testosterone Satisfaction Rating: Plenty of hacky-slashy, but Eva Green's raunchy bits, despite her protests, were left on the cutting room floor. To enjoy this film you should: enjoy mindless swords & sandy sieges.
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Your commentsThe comments printed here are not necessarily the views of Forwardcharm!
Well Kingdom of Heaven Ridley Scott should have stopped after Gladiator. Bloom is fine in Lord of the Rings as one third of a hero but asking him to stand alone in the spot light is a mistake, he’s a lot better in Kingdom of Heaven than he was in Troy (let’s face it he couldn’t be worse)
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Kingdom of Heaven stars Orlando Bloom as Balian, a recently bereaved blacksmith. For reasons I shan't divulge, he
travels to Jerusalem and leads a Christian army in a scrap against Muslims. Balian is a good man and therefore
has no qualms in sending his men to their death to defend a holy city that he doesn't believe in - despite the fact
that the priest is painted as an evil swine for suggesting exactly the same course of action. The morality of
Kingdom of Heaven is all over the place, telling us not to have blind faith in a religion, but blind faith in your
convictions is to be admired and encouraged. As with all war films, killing people is just fine as long as you think
you're the good guy. And still they try and preach to us. I can only hope nobody's listening.
Right, that's my war film rant over with, what about the acting? Well, Orlando's aspirations of mediocrity seem
to be paying off, he even reaches the dizzy heights of adequacy here, largely due to him toning down his bouncy
puppy dial a tad. With better timing and a little less intensity at the appropriate moments, he could become a
decent actor eventually. All of the cast are pretty good, with David Thewlis and Ghassan Massoud (the Muslim army
boss) worthy of particular praise. The real star though, is the special effects guy. The long shots of the battle
scenes are spectacular and some of them are indistinguishable from the real thing - it's only obvious that
the scenes are not real because they contain a hundred thousand people. The sequence involving the city siege
is one of the most effective uses of computer graphics I can remember seeing - it seems utterly real and believable
that these fiery balls are being hurled at the city walls and that huge siege towers containing twenty men are rolled
up to the walls. Very impressive stuff. The closer battle scenes I found less captivating. It's all very well
jumping the camera around, hack here, slash there, when it's one-on-one à la Gladiator (also directed by Ridley Scott),
but when there's a battlefield
full of people you simply can't see who's slashing whom. People are maimed, blood is spilled, and we assume the
victims are nobodies because we didn't get a close-up of their faces. It might convey the confusion of hand-to-hand
combat, but it doesn't help the cohesiveness of the experience.
So it's good after all then, is it? Well, yes and no. If you like this sort of thing (
