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When Peter Jackson made The Lord of the Rings films, those battle scenes set a new standard for epic filmmaking. It was as though he threw down the gauntlet, challenging other great filmmakers to "top that." And it seems Ridley Scott, director of this week's box office champion, Kingdom of Heaven, took the challenge personally. In his latest, masterful period re-creation, Scott brings the late 12th century to life, and plunges us into the Muslim siege of Jerusalem during the early days of the Crusades.

Scott has succeeded in crafting a better film than Gladiator, his last major period piece. Kingdom of Heaven offers a much richer and more complex web of stories, and it glorifies a search for virtue and peace that involves something more admirable than a mere revenge quest. We follow the journeys of Balian (Orlando Bloom)—a blacksmith, a widower, and a murderer—in his search for redemption, led by his long-lost father Godfrey (Liam Neeson), who teaches him about the virtuous character of a knight. Together, they struggle against a violent, power-hungry Christian soldier (Martin Csokas) to keep the leprous King (Edward Norton, performing brilliantly behind a mask) on the right path as the Muslim warlord Saladin moves against Jerusalem. Purpose-driven, Balian finds himself rising to become a leader.

Kingdom of Heaven is a movie of and for our times, truly. Screenwriter William Monahan tries very hard to talk about a historical clash of Christians and Muslims without offending Christians or Muslims. He does this by portraying a wide variety of religious individuals on both sides of the conflict, and by focusing on sins of arrogance and brutality instead of errors in dogma. Nevertheless, he does seem to favor the path of the compassionate agnostic, making it seem as if the world would be better if men merely followed their hearts and abandoned any sense of allegiance to a higher power.

My full review is at Looking Closer.

In his review at Christianity Today Movies, Peter T. Chattaway writes, "Kingdom of Heaven does for history what Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films did for Tolkien's novels—it turns its source material into an exciting, action-oriented spectacle, yet manages to capture something of the spirit of the original events. More importantly, the film raises provocative questions that, given their setting and theme, are reminiscent of more thoughtful epics like Lawrence of Arabia. Key among them is the relationship between God's will and human agency—and whether the former can ever be discerned in the latter."

(In his personal blog, Chattaway also wonders if Christian critics bothered by the film's portrayal of Christians were also bothered by films that caricatured other ethnic groups and cultures.)

Steven D. Greydanus (Decent Films) writes, "The story could largely be described as the failure of moderate Christians to restrain fanatical Christians from oppressing innocent Muslims, thereby provoking justifiable Muslim retaliation against the Christians, both fanatics and otherwise. Yet Saladin himself is not an uncomplicated noble figure. As he prepares to lay siege to Jerusalem, he explicitly rejects the possibility of showing mercy, relenting only when Balian fights him to a standstill. The film cross-examines the Christians in a way it doesn't the Muslims."

He concludes that it "leans toward the agnostic conclusion that the world might be better off if there were no temple wall, no mosque, no sepulchre for Christians, Jews, and Muslims to fight over. Alas, the sad history of religious strife in, over and around the Holy Land makes it difficult to fault the filmmakers for finding this a tempting point of view."

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May (Web-only) 2005, Vol. 49