"Kingdom of Heaven" movie review.

Kingdom of Heaven is spectacular, silly, historically inaccurate, unwittingly funny, badly scripted, and pretentious. So far, so conventional, you may say: just another Hollywood big-budget yarn a la DeMille and Troy. What makes Ridley Scott's epic about the Crusades different is a political message more insidious than the standard leftist-revisionist pap we've been fed by Tinseltown for decades. That message is that, in a conflict between Christians and Muslims, the former attack, the latter react. The true hero of the movie is Saladin, a wise warrior-king sans peur et sans reproche; its villains, the coarse and bloodthirsty Knights Templar.

The soap-opera storyline (go and see it for details) has the potential for great movie-making. What we get instead is Orlando Bloom rallying the defenders of Jerusalem with an oration in which he asserts that the holy city belongs to all three faiths equally. Saladin's captured sister is killed by Christians (a historical falsehood), but upon entering Jerusalem he nevertheless respectfully picks up a fallen cross (another fantasy). On such form, it is unsurprising that the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee praised the film as a "balanced" portrayal of the Crusades. Even the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a pro-terrorist front group based in Washington D.C., liked the movie. A spokesman for CAIR who remains unindicted as of this writing (unlike several of his colleagues) has said that "Muslims are shown as dignified and proud people whose lives are based on ethics and morality." A French actress whose contribution to the epic consists of flashing her sensual eyes in a dozen ways, boasted that the film will make all Muslims "extremely proud and happy, because they are seen as noble, chivalrous characters . . . [T]he Arab people behaved in a more noble way than the Christian people. Saladin was such a great character. He was the hero of his time."

Kingdom of Heaven does not tell you that the Crusades were defensive in nature, a reaction to the Muslim conquest, pillage, and enslavement of two thirds of Christendom. It does not even hint at the fact that, a few generations earlier, Christianity had covered, outside Europe, the ancient Roman province of Asia, extending across the Caucasus to the Caspian Sea, Syria with the Holy Land, and a wide belt of North Africa all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. In fact, most of the early medieval Christians lived not in Europe but in Asia Minor and Africa, which gave us countless fathers and martyrs. Unleashed on this world as the militant faith of a nomadic war band, Islam turned its boundary with the outside world into a perpetual war zone. The early attack on Christendom almost captured Constantinople when that city was still the most important center of the Christian world. But the Muslims also conquered Spain, and, had they not been stopped at Tours, the Koran in Gibbon's memorable phrase might have been taught in the schools of Oxford to a circumcised people.

The Crusades were but a temporary setback to Islamic expansion. But they have provided the source of endless arguments within the Western academia that sought to establish some moral equivalence between Muslims and Christians at first, and eventually to use the Crusades as a tool to elevate the former to victimhood and condemn the latter as aggressors. This is a spectacular role-reversal to which Kingdom of Heaven makes an enthusiastic contribution. Historically, the aggressors were Muslims, coarse fighting men, accustomed to living by pillage and the exploitation of settled populations. Heaping loot and jizya (Koranically ordained poll tax from conquered non-Muslims) was the only means of making a living known to them. Theirs was an "expansionism denuded of any concrete objective, brutal, and born of a necessity in its past" (Ibn Warraq).

Islam provided a powerful ideological justification for such expansionism. The view of modern Islamic activists, that "Islam must rule the world and until Islam does rule the world we will continue to sacrifice our lives" is in perfect tune with traditional Islam."O Prophet! Rouse the Believers to the fight," the Koran orders, and promises that 20 Muslims, "patient and persevering," would vanquish 200 unbelievers; if a hundred, they will vanquish a thousand (Koran, 8:65). Allah further orders the faithful to fight the unbelievers, and be firm with them: "And slay them wherever ye catch them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out; for tumult and oppression are worse than slaughter" (Koran, 2:191). The end of the fight is possible only when "there prevail justice and faith in Allah"(Koran, 2:193). Muhammad assured his flock that Allah guarantees to all jihadi warriors instant paradise in case of martyrdom, or "reward or booty he has earned": "Jihad is the best method of earning, both spiritual and temporal. If victory is won, there is enormous booty and conquest of a country, which cannot be equaled to any other source of earning. If there is defeat or death, there is everlasting Paradise and a great spiritual benefit."

Far from being wars of aggression, the Crusades were a belated military response of Christian Europe to over three centuries of Muslim aggression against Christian lands, the systemic mistreatment of the indigenous Christian population of those lands, and harassment of Christian pilgrims. The modern myth, so comprehensively propagated by the Kingdom of Heaven, has been promoted by Islamic propagandists for centuries and supported by their Western allies and apologists for decades. It claims that the peaceful Muslims, allegedly native to the Holy Land, were forced to take up arms in defense against European-Christian aggression. This myth takes A.D. 1095 as its starting point, but it ignores the preceding centuries, starting with the early caliphs, when Muslim armies swept through the Byzantine Empire, conquering about two thirds of the Christian world of that time.

The Muslim record of the preceding century was grim. In 1009, Hakem, the Fatimite Caliph of Egypt, ordered the destruction of the Holy Sepulchre and all the Christian establishments in Jerusalem. For years thereafter, Christians were persecuted even more cruelly than in the early period of Muslim rule. In 1065, thousands of Christian pilgrims who had crossed Europe under the leadership of Günther, Bishop of Bamberg, while on their way through Palestine, had to seek shelter in a ruined fortress where they defended themselves against Muslim attackers, in violation of earlier pledges that they would enjoy safe access to the holy sites. The rise of the Seljuk Turks compromised even the tenuous safety of Christian pilgrims. They conquered Armenia and Asia Minor, where their descendants still live. In 1070 they took Jerusalem, and in 1071 Diogenes, the Greek emperor, was defeated and made captive at Mantzikert. Syria was the next to become the prey of the Turks. Antioch succumbed in 1084, and by 1092 not one of the great metropolitan sees of Asia remained in the possession of the Christians.

In spite of the Great Schism of 1054, the Byzantine emperors deemed the renewed threat from the east serious enough to seek help from Rome. The battle of Manzikert was the indirect cause of the Crusades, heralding Byzantium's loss of control in Asia Minor. In 1073, letters were exchanged between Emperor Michael VII and Pope Gregory VII, who planned to send an army of 50,000 men to repulse the Turks. Gregory's successor, Urban II, took up those plans and convened a council at Clermont-Ferrand. A great number of knights and men of all conditions came and encamped on the plain of Chantoin, outside the city. On November 27, 1095, the Pope himself addressed the assembled multitudes, exhorting them to go forth and rescue the Holy Sepulchre. Amid cries of Deus hoc vult!God wills it!all pledged themselves by vow to depart for the Holy Land and received the cross of red cloth to be worn on the shoulder. The Pope sent letters to various courts, and the movement made rapid headway throughout Europe. The first detachments to leave Europe were poorly led, however, undisciplined, under-funded, destitute of equipment, prone to plunder of Christian lands they were crossing, and they ultimately met with disaster:

One of these bands, headed by Folkmar, a German cleric, was slaughtered by the Hungarians. Peter the Hermit, however, and the German knight, Walter the Pennyless (Gautier Sans Avoir), finally reached Constantinople with their disorganized troops. To save the city from plunder, Alexius Comnenus ordered them to be conveyed across the Bosphorus (August 1096); in Asia Minor they turned to pillage and were nearly all slain by the Turks. Meanwhile, the regular crusade was being organized in the West and, according to a well-conceived plan, the four principal armies were to meet at Constantinople.

Peter the Hermit was the most effective of preachers, and the lines of battle were clearly drawn: It was us against them, Christendom against the "Evil Empire of Mahound." The driving impulse was not that of conquest and aggression, but of recovery and defense, and liberation of the Christians who still in many places constituted the majority of the population. The Crusades were not Christendom's answer to Caliph Umar, they were a reaction to what he and his successors had done to Christians.

By May 1097, the armies were assembled, but many misunderstandings between the Greeks and the Latin Christians soon emerged. After an early victory over the Turks at the battle of Dorylæum on July 1, 1097, the Crusaders advanced through Asia Minor, constantly harassed by Muslims, suffering from heat, and sinking under the weight of their armor. They rested and recuperated among the Armenians of the Taurus region, made their way into Syria, and on October 20, 1097, laid siege to the fortified city of Antioch. On the night of June 2, 1098, they took the city by storm, but subsequent plague and famine decimated their ranks.

Rest, replenishment of men and supplies, and recuperation of worn-out survivors continued through the winter. It was not until April 1099 that the Crusader army marched on to Jerusalem, and on June 7 besieged the city. The attack began July 14, 1099 and the next day the Crusaders entered Jerusalem from all sides and slew its inhabitants. The soldiers of the Church Militant on this occasion proved that they could not only outfight but also out-massacre their Mohammedan foes. Further victories soon followed: In 1112, with the aid of Norwegians and the support of Genoese, Pisan, and Venetian fleets, Crusaders began the conquest of the ports of Syria, which was completed in 1124 by the capture of Tyre. Ascalon alone kept an Egyptian Muslim garrison until its fall in 1153.

The Crusades were initially successful because Islam was by no means a monolithic body-politic. The caliphate's authority was purely notional: Egypt was under the rule of the Fatimids, a Shi'ite sect, while the Sunni Turks from central Asia were gaining the upper hand in Shi'ite Persia, as well as Iraq, Syria, and Palestine. By the beginning of the "Glorious Twelfth," the Christian states-the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the Countship of Tripoli, the Principality of Antioch, and the Countship of Edessa-controlled an unbroken but tenuously held belt of territory roughly corresponding to the Fertile Crescent between the Euphrates and the Sinai. It was long and thin: the preoccupation with the holy places and ports precluded any serious attempt to develop strategic depth, or to create a viable local economic and demographic base for the new Christian states.

The necessity of defending these fragile Outremer domains, coupled with the lack of reliable local recruits, resulted in the creation of the religious orders of knighthood: the Hospitallers and the Templars. They attracted the younger sons of feudal houses and acquired both in Palestine and in Europe considerable property. Their bravery and discipline-allegedly but unprovenly cemented by certain unspeakable practices within the Templar brotherhood-could not compensate for the Crusader states lack of cohesion and discipline, however. The help they received from the West was too scattered and intermittent. The Principality of Edessa was the first to succumb to the Muslim counteroffensive on Christmas Day 1144, and Damascus fell in 1154.

From steyneonline.com

KINGDOM OF HEAVEN

Let’s say you were setting out to make a parody of contemporary Hollywood’s inability to make a film on any historical subject except through the prism of its own droning self-congratulatory predictable pieties, and let’s say you’d picked as the topic for this parody the Crusades — you remember, long wars back in the day, Muslims vs Christians. What would this parody look like?

Well, for a start, this Crusade wouldn’t be between Muslims and Christians, it would be between the ‘fanatics on both sides’ and enlightened progressive types who just want to live together celebrating their multicultural diversity. When I say ‘fanatics on both sides’, whoa, don’t worry: showing the fanatics on the Muslim side might be injurious to one’s long-term health and there’s no Oscar for Best Fatwa. So in practice we’d focus on the fanatics on the Christian side — rich white racists, sort of like early Bush voters — and the hero opposing them would be a maverick Crusader, a brave secular progressive with the cojones to stand up to them. Sort of like Sir Ridley Scott, but younger and better backlit, though just as mystifyingly knighted. He’d have a beard, though not too full a beard, but not too neat and groomed and effete either. In fact, we’d spend quite a bit of money grooming it into its ungroomed look.

He has to be a knight, of course, otherwise he wouldn’t get access to the posh totty wandering round the mediaeval banqueting suites or get to object when the by-the-book Crusaders propose slaughtering all the Muslims. But he’s not really cool with the whole knight club scene. His place is with the people. Wherever he goes, the extras love him. On his own land, he pitches in to help dig the irrigation channels, working side by side with minimum-wage non-speaking members of both Christian Equity and Islamic Equity. And, if it weren’t for the fact that he’s the only commander on the Christian side who isn’t an incompetent boob, he’d gladly go back to his old job of...hmm, let’s see: boyband lead singer? London motorcycle courier? Demi Moore’s new beau? Second-year Gwent Polytechnic sociology student? No, I’ve got it. We’ll make him a blacksmith. Young, gifted and blacksmith, that’s our boy — off to the Holy Land to clean out the Augean stables. Mr Blacksmith Goes to Jerusalem.

How about the girl? I’m sorry, I mean of course ‘strong independent woman’. She’s the people’s princess, kohl-rimmed eyes and all. She looks as babelicious as the hero, but with less facial hair. She thinks nothing of riding out into the desert, dropping her veil and shagging like a minx.

Oh, and who do we get for Saladin? We need someone cool, measured, wise — not like these religious-right moral-majority nuts on the Christian side. Someone tall, dark and handsome. Hey, how about Osama bin Laden? Oh, okay, if we’ve been faxing the cave for two months and he still won’t play ball, let’s make do with Ghassan Massoud, who’s a close enough Osama bin Ladalike, at least in the long shots.

And, while we’re at it, for the full supporting knights get some of those high-toned Brit types — Sir Jeremy Irons, Sir David Thewlis, Sir Liam Neeson, Sir Laurence Olivier, Sir John Gielgud, Sir Norman Wisdom (check availability) — but just give ’em a couple of lines every 20 minutes or so, in between battle scenes. They can say things like ‘I put no stock in religion’ in a worldly drawl.

Thus does Sir Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven proceed, from one birdbrained ahistorical cliché to another, until at last Balian of Ibelin (the impeccably dishevelled Orlando Bloom) comes face to face with Saladin and threatens to destroy Jerusalem’s holy sites, all of them, mosque and sepulchre alike — ‘Your holy places, ours, everything that drives men mad.’ Hold that thought, because certainly nobody held it in 1187 — and in the false tinkle of that line you hear everything that’s wrong with this movie. I doubt you could have found one bloke on either side who’d utter such a formulation — in its smug assumptions about ‘organised religion’, it’s a Hollywood dinner-party thought. Likewise, ‘I put no stock in religion.’ Eight centuries ago, ‘religion’ wasn’t something you had the option of putting stock in. It was what you were, Christian or Muslim, believer or infidel. Scott has Jeremy Irons shrug it off as if he were saying, ‘I’m not really into movies.’

The problem with Kingdom of Heaven is not that it’s hostile to Christianity or sympathetic to Islam but that it has such little feeling for either faith, save as a pretext for war and killing and ‘driving men mad’. What’s really mad is that this film made it to general release without anybody in the process saying, ‘Er, Ridley, I think you’re missing the point here.’ And, without religion, what’s left? A boring story punctuated by expensively dull carnage. If Jeremy Irons puts no stock in religion, Ridley Scott’s mistake is to put no religion in his stock footage.
The Spectator, May 14th 2005

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