Yesterday I saw the Ridley Scott epic The Kingdom of Heaven.

And it wasn´t epic. It was a rather mediocre movie. Not a bad movie, but a mediocre movie. I think that those extra 45 minutes that Scott has saved for the DVD release should have been included in the theater release, as now the movie is shallow. It looks vast in scope, but has little depth. The main hero especially is a character that has about as much depth as Orlando Bloom´s most famous character, Legolas, has in the Lord of The Rings movies.

Of course, the history was butchered on the movie. The real Balian of Ibelin was replaced with an imaginary one, which I can understand as an artistic license, but I can´t understand why there was this moment straight from the Gladiator, where Baldwin IV offers Balian the hand of Sibylla - in real life, Isabella - and the kingship, and the fool says no, causing all the bad that will happen, just like Maximus in the Gladiator. A better thing would have been letting the movie follow real history. After all, Isabella was not the heir of Baldwin IV. The heir was Isabella´s son, the child king Baldwin V, who "ruled" a year before his own death and the disastrous rise to power of Guy of Lusignan. Who was more incompetent fool than a warmonger. And a man that the real Sibylla(Isabella) kept up with.

There were other problems. Like the one that the Christians were shown as a one monolithic entity. Of course, the Christians who ruled the Crusader states were Catholics and the native Orthodox Christians were crushed unter their feet, not as badly as the native Muslims and Jews, but who still were an oppressed people under the rule of the Crusaders. In the real siege of Jerusalem in 1187, they had little eagerness to fight for the Crusaders - in fact, according to a chronicle of the time, they wanted them to die, and were angry that Saladin didn´t kill the Latin Christians of Jerusalem. And what comes to the Latin clergy, in real life the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem left the city after the surrender with a huge load of material goods, not empty handed as in the movie. Latin Christians had to pay for their release after the surrender, but could take with them as much as they could of their goods. The poorest couldn´t pay the price demanded for release and the wealthier ones didn´t want to pay for the release of their poorer fellows, who then ended as slaves.

Other problems were the portrayal of Templars as the bad guys and the Hospitalers as good. At least in the eyes of Saladin there was no difference between them. Those Templars and Hospitalers that surrendered in the battle of the Horns of Hattin were all executed. I could continue for a long time, but couple of thing more and then I will end this. First, at the text in the beginning of the movie, it is claimed that the time of the Crusades was an era of depression and poverty to Europe. This is wrong. Of course, most people were poor, but it was also a time of great economic revival, the change from barter economy to monetary, the great flourishing of cities, of rapidly expansing population, the revival of learning etc. People in Western Europe in 1184 were better-off than their ancestors in 1084 and and far better-off than their ancestors in 984. The time of the Crusades were a good time for Europe. The time from about 1050 to 1315 was a time of constant growth and growing prosperity in Europe. Secondly, those speeches that Balian gives in Jerusalem during the siege - no Christian commander at the time would have said them. And if he would have, he would have been killed at the spot by his own troops.