last highlighted date: 2024-10-14
Highlights
- After the town priest (Balian’s half-brother) reveals that he ordered Balian’s wife’s body beheaded before burial, Balian inspects the priest thoroughly, noticing the priest had stolen his wife’s necklace and kills him before fleeing the village.
- such as Roger Ebert found the film’s message to be deeper than that of Scott’s Gladiator.[14]
- performance as the leper-King Baldwin as “phenomenal”, and “so far removed from anything that he has ever done that we see the true complexities of his talent”.
- In the time since the film’s release, scholars have offered analysis and criticisms through a lens situating Kingdom of Heaven within the context of contemporary international events and religious conflict, including: broad post-9/11 politics, neocolonialism, Orientalism, the Western perspective of the film, and the detrimental handling of differences between Christianity and Islam.[26]
- “which depicts the Muslims as sophisticated and civilized, and the Crusaders are all brutes and barbarians. It has nothing to do with reality”.[27]
- Scott himself defended this depiction of the Muslim–Christian relationship in footage on the DVD version of the movie’s extra features
- The “Director’s Cut” of the film is a four-disc set, two of which are dedicated to a feature-length documentary called The Path to Redemption. This feature contains an additional featurette on historical accuracy called “Creative Accuracy: The Scholars Speak”, where a number of academics support the film’s contemporary relevance and historical accuracy.