The Kingdom of Blah

An article by Don Quixote    No Comments

Michelle and I in a fit of celebration (she had her last final on Saturday morning), decided to head off to lunch and a movie.

For us, the choice was obvious, Kingdom of Heaven. I mean, come on – how can you go wrong? Ridley Scott, Liam, Orlando Bloom, and Ed Norton in a mask. I mean this guy did Gladiator, so it’s gotta totally rock right?

Well to give you an idea of how exciting it was, Michelle dozed off about half way through.

Don’t get me wrong, it was a great action flick, the battle scenes were awesome, but the whole 2 and a half hour story just left me flat. This was on the verge of being a great movie, it could have been very powerful but it had no heart.

We all got the point that man kills in the name of God because that’s what man desires. “God wills it!” was the chant as man decided to rush off into war and kill his enemies was repeated over and over and over. We get that the “Church” became more interested in its profits than it was in the goal of conversion. All very nice and neat stuff, but why was poor Orlando willing to risk his life for the city of Jerusalem.

I mean there were a hundred different reasons of “why”, but none of them were developed into anything more than a remote suggestion. None of them meshed with each other. I won’t go into them all because that was would ruin the story for you. But pick a motivation and develop the story.

The other large problem was the progression of time. Events pass, but you have no idea if a few hours, days, weeks, months or years have past between one scene and the next.

I won’t even comment on this historical accuracy of this flick (mostly because I don’t know).

So it was a solid 5. As in I am glad it only cost me $5 to see it, I’m glad Michelle only slept for 5 minutes of the movie.