9 / 10
Official trailer
Kingdom of Heaven is two different films. The theatrical cut is a confused 144-minute medieval action movie that critics dismissed and audiences ignored. The director’s cut is a 194-minute religious epic that’s among the best films Ridley Scott has ever made. If you’ve only seen the theatrical version, you haven’t seen the film. Watch the director’s cut.
Scott directed it. William Monahan wrote the screenplay. Orlando Bloom plays Balian of Ibelin, a French blacksmith who discovers he’s the bastard son of a Crusader baron and ends up defending Jerusalem against Saladin in 1187. Eva Green plays Sibylla, the king’s sister. Jeremy Irons plays Tiberias, the marshal.
Edward Norton plays the leper-king Baldwin IV behind a silver mask. Liam Neeson plays Balian’s father. Ghassan Massoud plays Saladin and steals the film.
I’d give the director’s cut three and a quarter hours of any evening. It’s the rare epic where the arguments about faith move me more than the battles, and Massoud’s Saladin carries so much dignity that I catch myself rooting for the man besieging the heroes. The theatrical cut threw away far too much.
The Director’s Cut
Fifty additional minutes of footage transform the film from a competent action picture into a meditation on faith and tolerance during the actual collapse of the crusader kingdoms.
Sibylla has an actual subplot in the director’s cut. Balian’s grief over his wife’s suicide has weight. The political situation in Jerusalem makes sense. The entire subplot about Sibylla’s son being secretly a leper, the central tragedy of her character, is missing from the theatrical version entirely.
The difference isn’t minor. The theatrical cut is a 6.
The director’s cut is a 9. The studio cut the film to be more commercial. It became less commercial as a result, and almost twenty years later the film exists in the popular memory only because the director’s cut was eventually released on home video.
That studio decision was indefensible. Somebody watched the Sibylla story, her son’s leprosy included, and decided the audience didn’t need it, and that call gutted Eva Green’s whole performance. I’d love to know who signed off on it.
For Writers
The theatrical cut of Kingdom of Heaven is a case study in what happens when you remove what looks like fat and turns out to have been organ. Sibylla’s subplot looks like padding to a studio executive. It’s the emotional spine of the film. When it’s gone, the rest of the story is connective tissue with nothing to connect. The lesson is that you can’t cut a story by word count alone. You have to know what each scene is doing structurally.
Cut the wrong thing and you lose what made the work work.
The Religious Argument
Scott’s film is unusually fair to all three religions involved.
The Muslim characters aren’t villains, and Saladin is as decent as anybody in the picture. The Christian fanatics are villains, and the script makes clear that fanaticism is their crime. The Templars come off worst because the historical Templars at that time and place were the worst. Norton’s Baldwin IV is a tolerant ruler whose tolerance holds Jerusalem together, and when he dies it dies with him. I’m still amazed how much Norton gets across from behind that silver mask.
Balian’s final speech to the citizens of Jerusalem during the siege is the thesis of the film. Holiness is in the people, not the place. The script believes this. The film commits to it. The line isn’t throwaway dialogue.
That speech is where the film gets me. I believe Scott believes it, and a studio epic that pauses a siege to argue that holiness lives in people is attempting something I almost never see a big-budget picture try.
For Writers
A film about religion that takes religion seriously is rare and difficult. Kingdom of Heaven doesn’t mock faith. It also doesn’t endorse any particular faith. It argues that faith is something humans do and that what they do with it determines whether faith is good or bad. The lesson is that you can write seriously about belief if you understand that belief isn’t the same as the institution built around it. The accurate treatment respects both the believer and the doubt.
The Battle Scenes
The Battle of Kerak and the Siege of Jerusalem are both well-staged.
The siege sequence is the better of the two. Scott shoots medieval siege warfare with attention to the actual mechanics: how the towers were built, how the catapults worked, how the defenders responded, what the chaos looked like inside a city wall being breached. The trebuchet bombardment is among the best sequences of its kind put on film.
The trebuchet bombardment is the sequence I’d show anybody who says Scott only knows how to make things look expensive. You can feel the weight of every stone, and the film is right to care how the machines worked.
The final cavalry charge against the Templars before Balian arrives at Jerusalem is a great set piece on its own merits. The sound design is exceptional throughout.
For Writers
Battle sequences in historical fiction benefit from research more than from invention. The siege of Jerusalem in Kingdom of Heaven works because the mechanics are correct. The towers do what towers did. The defenders respond the way defenders responded. The lesson is that accurate process beats invented spectacle. The reader doesn’t always know what’s accurate, but they can feel when something has been thought through and when it hasn’t.
Craft Note
Ridley Scott directed. William Monahan wrote. Orlando Bloom played Balian of Ibelin. Eva Green played Sibylla. Jeremy Irons played Tiberias. Edward Norton played Baldwin IV. Liam Neeson played Godfrey of Ibelin. Ghassan Massoud played Saladin. Brendan Gleeson played Reynald of Châtillon. Marton Csokas played Guy de Lusignan. David Thewlis played the Hospitaller. Theatrical cut released May 2005 at 144 minutes. Director’s cut released on DVD 2006 at 194 minutes. Both versions exist. Watch the director’s cut.
Is Kingdom of Heaven as good as people say?
9/10 for the director’s cut, 6/10 for the theatrical cut. The studio cut the wrong things and turned a great film into a mediocre one before release, and I can’t forgive that. The director’s cut restores the missing material and gives us a historical epic I’d put near the top of anything from the 2000s, with Massoud’s Saladin, Norton’s masked king and a siege that feels real. Watch the long version or don’t bother.
