88 - Kingdom of Heaven

    A blacksmith is brought into participating in the crusades.  He attempts to foster an uneasy peace.
    I picked this Blu-ray up from a church rummage sale.  For $5, I could fill up a grocery bag with as much stuff as I wanted from a room.  This was the only Blu-ray, and I saw it was directed by Ridley Scott, so how bad could it be?
    This movie runs a grinding three hours, and it varies greatly in pacing.  The first hour and a half is a strange mix, mostly being slow, atmospheric material, punctuated by violence that seems almost comical in intensity.  After that, the movie slides into more battle sequences.
    First, the good stuff.  It’s photographed well.  The locations are spectacular, the costumes, all of that stuff - it’s great.  It’s nice to see these large-scale historical epics filmed like this.  The fighting is good, but feels a little too fancy for their roles, and for the weight of their weapons and armor.
    The bad stuff.  The story.  I actually think that the central story is a decent one, but it was not handled well by the script.  It took until around 40 minutes in before we hit an event that made me care about the protagonist.  He says very little in the movie, and it’s hard to think highly of him.  It’s also hard to think badly of him.  He simply seems impossible to read.  The script is a pain.  Most of the dialogue seems overly broad, with dull characterization, or alternately, just vague mystery.
    I know this is a poor description.  For people who like historical epics, and those more interested in the crusades, this might be a great movie.
    My biggest problem is that no one seems to know that they’re all being idiots.  They’re fighting for religious causes that don’t make sense.  Whenever the reasoning is switched over to focus on the land and power aspect, even that doesn’t hold up very well.  No one seems to realize that it’s not worth participating in any of this stuff.  Even the hero, with his interest in maintaining a peace, seems to be entirely sucked into proclaiming religious values instead of humanitarian ones.  Historically correct?  Probably.  But it still makes him an idiot.  This turns the movie into one that I have a hard time identifying with.