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reviewAlso in this section: Kingdom of heaven a movie review by Eric Jackson
Kingdom of
Heaven Here we have the director of "Black Hawk Down" going back to making war flicks --- or as Ridley Scott more precisely put it on the BBC, an antiwar film. There has long been an antiwar genre in the body of world cinema, so vast that it's probably subdivisible now, encompassing everything from "The Day the Earth Stood Still" to adaptations of "All Quiet on the Western Front", from "Alexander Nevsky" to "MASH", from "Fahrenheit 9/11" to "The Planet of the Apes" and between and well beyond all of those. (In this broad genre there are, to this reviewer, at least two great pillars, both directed by the late Stanley Kubrick: the World War I drama "Paths of Glory" and the nuclear holocaust comedy "Dr. Strangelove." This aside is to let the readers know where the reviewer's prejudices are in this matter.) With "Kingdom of Heaven" Ridley Scott, among whose other works are "Blade Runner," "Alien," "Gladiator," "Thelma & Louise," "Matchstick Men" and "Hannibal," has made his mark --- really not his first one but his most noteworthy one to date --- in the wide category of antiwar films. This is a tale of a bereft French blacksmith (Orlando Bloom), the socially ostracized bastard son of a great nobleman who has lost his wife and child, getting recruited into the Crusades. It's the story of how the fragile peace that had been maintained between the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem and the surrounding Muslim kingdom was broken, most grievously so. The peacekeepers had included the young but now dying King Baldwin IV and his Saracen counterpart, the legendary warrior king Saladin. The warmongers were a collection of political opportunists, religious nuts, hoodlums, fools and adventurers. Many other more sensible people, answering their disparate calls of conscience and duty, rallied to their respective Christian or Muslim banners when the the war that Baldwin's vain successor unwisely provoked came to pass. The Christian warmongers promptly marched off to their utter annihilation. This left it to the antiwar dissident baron, the erstwhile blacksmith, to organize city residents into a ragtag militia, get war production booming and prepare for a terrible siege. Now it had become a war led on the one side by a Catholic who had come to heretical conclusions about relations among Christians, Muslims and Jews that were remarkably like the ecumenical thoughts that later got DeMolay burned at the stake; and on the other by the tolerant, trustworthy and generous but on the battlefield most dangerous of Kurdish warriors, Saladin (Ghassan Massoud). The antagonists might have been the best of friends, but that the former had a city and its inhabitants to defend and the latter an intolerable alien colony and chronic source of wars to extirpate and these conflicting duties made them the deadliest of enemies. The best that the defenders could hope for was to hold the attackers off, inflicting such horrendous casualties on their foes that the inevitable peace terms would spare the lives of the defenders and their families. And that they did, in several of the film's wonderful and horrible battle scenes. Many people who come to see a war movie and not particularly to hear an antiwar message will want to see this film primarily as one about medieval warfare. The carnage was prodigious, the war was not glorious and in the end the Christian kingdom in Jerusalem was no more. But the defenders and their families got their amnesty and safe conduct. So what does this have to do with Iraq or Osama bin Laden? Nothing, and everything. I wonder how this film will play in Kurdistan, if it plays in Kurdistan. I wonder how many Americans and Brits will see this film and think again --- or maybe for the first time --- about the nature of holy crusades, jihads against the infidels and the other modern manifestations of the ancient curse of religious warfare. I wonder if Osama will issue a fatwah against the flick, not only because it depicts the human form but also because it celebrates the mercy and tolerance that characterized the thinking of one of Islam's greatest warriors and wisest rulers. (By the way, as another aside, what does Osama really have to show compared to one Yusuf ibn-Ayyub Salah-ad-Din, the Saladin who conquered Jerusalem in 1187? The latter became sultan of Egypt at age 36, drove the Crusaders from the Holy City, stalemated Richard the Lion-Hearted, and beat the king of France and seduced that foe's independent-minded wife. Can Osama's ephemeral successes in Afghanistan, his intimidation of Saudi Arabia and the smears of bloodshed that he and his minions have wrought across several continents even remotely compare?) The Christian jihadis of our time might not like "Kingdom of Heaven" either. This work of historical fiction lays the antecedents and probable consequences of their traditional folly all too bare. But not to worry. Even as the notion that holy war is a murderous fraud seeps ever deeper and more indelibly into world popular culture via films like this and infinite "otherwise," no Crusaders against Saracens flick will have the slightest impact on what George Bush and Tony Blair do in the Middle East. "Kingdom of Heaven" will surely be seen as many sometimes contradictory things by many people, and since the movie has high production values --- for good acting, photography, effects, costumes, direction, writing and so on --- I suspect that among the diverse impressions generated among viewers will be some favorable ones left upon the elites of the film industry, which will serve to get this film multiple Oscar nominations. Go see this flick, this great war story, this tale with a message, this polished work of art. If for nothing else, go so that you might understand why the use of the word "crusade" is unwise when engaged in an armed geopolitical chess match with the likes of Osama bin Laden.
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