BEFORE: Went out to an NYU alumni Happy Hour last night, for the schools of arts and sciences combined. I had an ulterior motive, I wanted to meet someone from the alumni office, because I heard that they offer free career counseling to alumni - a free half-hour, anyway - and I just have a feeling that I'm going to need some counseling or advice in the near future. Call me crazy, but I just think either my job's going to shut down, or I'm going to quit for the sake of my own sanity, and then I'm going to need some job-hunting help really fast. So I got someone's card, anyway, should I need those services. Other than that, I had three beers and a few plates of bar food for just $25, so that's a good deal, I think, especially for a Manhattan pub in the East Village. Didn't see anyone I remembered from my time at NYU, but I was probably the only member of the class of 1989 in attendance.
Liam Neeson carries over one more time from "Gun Shy".
THE PLOT: Balian of Ibelin travels to Jerusalem during the Crusades of the 12th century and there he finds himself as the defender of the city and its people.
AFTER: This movie was produced by 12th Century Fox. Just kidding. But it's set between the second and third Crusades, and I feel like that should mean something, but I'm just not an expert on the medieval period. That was my ex-wife's thing, and I never really got into that part of history like she did. Who the heck wants to romanticize the times before electricity, before TV and movies and video-games, all that good stuff. And no CARS? Jeez, I know horses had a good long run, but what a pain in the neck all that riding around must have been. I know we're much closer to the end-times and all, and we're always riding on the edge of that apocalypse thing, but who cares, I'd much rather be alive NOW, it's so much better than THEN. All that hokey religion and stupid kings making stupid rules and thousands of people dying during the Crusades, and for what? So some European gits could go there and look for the "true cross" and other Biblical artifacts, which the con artists who live in "the Holy Land" probably just all made up? Oh, yeah, and to kill a lot of Muslim people, I guess that was important back then.
The truth of the matter is that for thousands of years, Jerusalem's been the center of a giant faith-swinging contest, it's the only city that THREE religions consider holy: Judaism, Christianity and Islam, but for different reasons. And so naturally all these men of peace have been fighting over it for centuries. Read that back again and you'll see the problem. Whatever happened to the parable about the Judgment of King Solomon, when two mothers came to the king with a dead baby and a live baby, and both claimed to be the mother of the live baby. Solomon's solution was to cut the baby in half, so they could share it. The real mother was the one who immediately offered it to the other, so it could live.
By the same token, if any of those three religions really loved the city of Jerusalem, they would leave it, right? Because fighting over a city is only going to leave it in ruins, and then what good is it to anyone? Yeah, this movie gets there (eventually) but there's a lot of bloodshed first. AND even though the Christians end up leaving Jerusalem rather than burning it to the ground, in just a few years the Second Crusade would be followed by the Third Crusade, where Europeans went BACK to take the city from the Muslims. So, not much was really learned, then, was it? Every day as humans if we can't get smarter we should at least try to get less dumb, but tell that to King Richard the Lion-Hearted, I guess. Bear in mind, there were NINE Crusades in all - so much for getting smarter.
"Kingdom of Heaven" refers to the city of Jerusalem, OK so it's no "Big Apple" or "Windy City", but it sounds sort of nice, to some degree. Unfortunately the full nickname was probably "Kingdom of Heaven that Three Religions Are Always Fighting Over". That was just too long for the license plates. The film is about Balian, a blacksmith whose wife just committed suicide, and the town priest had his wife beheaded before burial, which meant, according to dogma, that she couldn't go to heaven and her soul would be stuck in hell without a head. Or something like that. So Balian gets very angry and sets the priest on fire, then heads out on the road to find his father, Godfrey, who had just swung by the day before to introduce himself. ("Hello, I'm the guy that raped your mother 21 years ago, and you look about 20, so I must be your Papa." Bit of an awkward and blunt conversation, but it got the job done.)
Balian and Godfrey head out for Jerusalem, where a man can be a man and have all his sins forgiven. Also, those of his dead wife who offed herself. But first soldiers arrive to arrest Balian for killing that priest - there's a big battle and most of Godfrey's men die, but they still kill all the soldiers, so I guess that's a win? The survivors head to Messina, where they can sail for the Holy Land - only Godfrey's still got an arrow in him from the battle, and dies shortly after naming his son the new Baron of Ibelin, whatever that means. Balian's ship sinks just before reaching the shore, so really, it seems like this guy just can't get a break. He's the only survivor, and great, he made it close to Jerusalem but not close enough, he's got to fight a few Muslims before he can get there.
But once he makes it to Jerusalem, things are looking up! He's the inheritor of Godfrey's estate, naturally, so he's got 1,000 acres of land, families living and working the land, and the King of Jerusalem's sister wants to cheat on her husband with him. King Baldwin IV is a leper who wears a silver mask, and he's negotiated a fragile truce with the Muslims, so everything will be fine as long as the King stays alive. Yeah, about that...
The king's brother-in-law is this Guy (no, really that's his name), aka Sibylla's husband, who starts attacking the Saracen caravans with a buddy named Raynald, because they can, and this leads to Muslim attacks on a place called Kerak. Balian defends the villagers of Kerak because everybody else is busy, and he becomes sort of a rising star. When the Muslims retreat another truce is declared, and all the Muslims want is Raynald, but just to torture him. Seems about right.
The leper king dies, and the crown passes to Sibylla's son, but that doesn't work out for very long, and so her husband, this Guy, becomes the new King of Jerusalem, and from that point on, all bets are off. Guy releases Raynald, kills Saladin's sister, and declares war on the Saracens. Nobody listens to Balian, who thinks that sticking close to water sources might be a good idea during a prolonged desert battle. It seems he's the only person getting less dumb each time. But nobody listens to him, so there's a three-day siege of Jerusalem by the Muslims, which creates a giant pile of bodies and nearly wrecks the whole town. Now nobody gets it!
Actually the Christians agree to leave, and the Muslims allow them safe passage to the sea. Balian goes back to...France (?) with Sibylla and then manages to avoid getting dragged in to the Third Crusade. I think he earned some down time, don't you? There's something of a valuable lesson here, it's OK just being a blacksmith, having a dead-end job and never going anywhere. It could be worse, you could go to Jerusalem and end up defending it against an army - he should have just stayed where he was, sure he was miserable but he could have found a new wife someday, and the smithing business could have picked up, right?
The big deal in this film is the battle scenes, of course, no expense was spared to make this big siege with thousands of arrows flying through the air, trebuchets flinging giant exploding (?) rocks at the city walls, people on the battlements pouring boiling oil on the attackers down below, etc. Some of it looks so cool you may forget that this all took place way before guns were invented. But why did humans ever give up on the exploding rock technology? I wonder...
Well, it's NOT the film that's been on my DVR the longest, but still, it's been on there since June of 2021 - so I'm glad to have watched it, it's a long movie and it was taking up a lot of space. I'm dubbing as many films off the DVR as I can, but it's always, always a struggle. I should probably try to just focus on THOSE films on the DVR and try to connect to as many of them as I can.
Also starring Orlando Bloom (last seen in "Elizabethtown"), Eva Green (last seen in "Dumbo" (2019)), Jeremy Irons (last seen in "Love, Weddings & Other Disasters"), David Thewlis (last seen in "I'm Thinking of Ending Things"), Brendan Gleeson (last seen in "Into the Storm"), Marton Csokas (last seen in "The Debt"), Edward Norton (last seen in "After the Sunset"), Michael Sheen (last seen in "How to Build a Girl"), Velibor Topic, Ghassan Massoud (last seen in "All the Money in the World"), Alexander Siddig (last seen in "21 Bridges"), Khaled Nabawy (last seen in "Fair Game"), Kevin McKidd (last seen in "Tulip Fever"), Michael Shaeffer (last seen in "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story"), Jon Finch (last seen in "Frenzy"), Ulrich Thomsen (last seen in "Mortdecai"), Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (last seen in "Wimbledon"), Martin Hancock (last seen in "Defiance"), Nathalie Cox (last seen in "Clash of the Titans"), Eriq Ebouaney (last seen in "The Take"), Jouko Ahola, Giannina Facio (also last seen in "All the Money in the World"), Philip Glenister (last seen in "Calendar Girls"), Bronson Webb (last seen in "The Batman"), Steven Robertson (last seen in "T2 Trainspotting"), Iain Glen (also last seen in "Into the Storm"), Angus Wright (last seen in "The Witches" (2020)), Michael Fitzgerald (last seen in "The Bookshop")
RATING: 5 out of 10 siege towers
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