Kingdom of Heaven (Director’s Cut) (194 minutes; 2005)

Written by William Monahan. Directed by Ridley Scott.

(There is a shorter theatrical cut, which should be avoided at all costs, like the plague it is.)

What is it?

Ridley Scott’s epic saga of the Crusades, as seen through the eyes of a simple French blacksmith who travels to Jerusalem in an attempt to save the soul of his late wife, and ends up as the defender of the city against the massive army of Saladin.

Noteworthy

After massive edits mandated by the studio in order to shorten it, the theatrical cut of this film was a bomb. The restored Director’s Cut is, to put it simply, a masterpiece. It is a completely different film from the one the editors hacked to pieces and sent out to theaters, with 45 minutes (!!) of restored footage that completely changes the story and the characters.

For one example of many: in the theatrical cut, Eva Green’s character, the Queen of Jerusalem, comes across as acting irrationally, because we don’t know her motivations. In the Director’s Cut, we gain entirely new and powerful subplots involving her brother, her husband and her son, all of which render her actions quite clear and understandable. The queen becomes half of the beating heart of the story.

How anyone could have thought the movie was improved by omitting even a portion of that material is beyond comprehension.

The cast is filled with famous actors. Orlando Bloom stars as the reluctant warrior, Balian. Eva Green is the queen of Jerusalem (with Edward Norton uncredited as her brother, the leper king). Liam Neeson is the Baron of Ibelin and father of Balian. Jeremy Irons is, effectively, the police chief of Jerusalem.

The rest of the stellar cast includes Michael Sheen, David Thewlis, Kevin McKidd, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Marton Csokas, Alexander Siddig, Ghassan Massoud, Brendan Gleeson and Iain Glen, among many others. Good heavens.

With the increasing availability of the Director’s Cut, public acclaim for the film has drastically improved. In just the past year alone, the IMDb rating has risen from 5.6 to 7.3, presumably on the strength of viewers’ votes after seeing the Director’s Cut. At this rate, it should deservedly reach a perfect 10 within a couple more years!

(Also of note: Scott’s underrated 2010 Robin Hood movie, starring Russell Crowe, is arguably a direct sequel. Kingdom of Heaven ends with King Richard the Lionheart stopping by Balian’s village on his way to the Crusades, while Robin Hood begins with the king’s journey back home.)

Quick and Dirty Summary

During the Crusades, Balian the blacksmith (Bloom) travels from France to Jerusalem to seek forgiveness from God for himself and for his late wife, who committed suicide after the death of their infant child.

Along the way, he kills his half-brother (Sheen) — who needed killing, honestly. He discovers his true father (Neeson), falls in love with a queen (Green), battles corrupt knights (Csokas and Gleeson), and befriends a king (Norton).

He also wrestles with moral questions, impresses a top aide (Siddig) to the great warlord Saladin (Massoud), and absorbs wise counsel from knights such as Hospitaler (Thewlis) and Tiberias (Irons), helping him grow as a man, a knight and a leader. And just in time – because the next thing he knows, this former blacksmith is suddenly in charge of defending Jerusalem from attack by Saladin’s massive army!

Fantasy/SF/Sword & Sorcery Elements

There’s plenty of sword, as in a number of battles involving massive armies, as well as several individual duels (one sword, two swords, a half-molten sword – a lot of swords!). The sorcery elements are more of a religious nature, but unquestionably and increasingly supernatural as the story unfolds.

The Hospitaller Knight – no other name is given for him – is the focus of the most fantastical aspects of the story. At three particular moments he exhibits abilities that elevate him from mere human to divine and perhaps angelic being.

First, during an early battle scene, Hospitaler evades arrows by disappearing from his horse as it runs through the Crusader camp. Ridley Scott doesn’t play fair with us here, however, as we quickly see that the knight has simply shifted to the far side of the horse, hanging on for dear life while making his horse appear riderless. But it serves a tease for what is to come.

The second scene cranks up the weirdness quite a bit. As Balian sits alone in the desert, brooding over his situation, Hospitaller walks up and addresses him, handing out more deep moral philosophy. Once the knight is done, a literal “burning bush” distracts Balian. When he looks back a moment later, Hospitaler is nowhere to be seen. In true Batman fashion, he has vanished from a vast, wide-open desert. Balian’s horse cries out and rears, as if a ghost – or an angel – had just moved past it, invisible.

Finally, when Balian lies near death following a fight with two of Guy’s Templar knights, Hospitaller appears from out of nowhere. He touches Balian on the forehead, restoring him to life – just in time to try to stop the army of Jerusalem from marching out to its destruction.

Clearly, there’s something going on with that character beyond the realms of mortal man. Some have argued Hospitaler is God himself, or at least an angel, sent to guide Balian. But we are left to puzzle out those specifics for ourselves.

High Point

For all the action and romance and adventure, what still rings true above all else with this film is its powerful message that what king one serves or what religion one adheres to does not ultimately make one a good or bad person. What matters is what we choose to do, and choose not to do – as both the leper king and the priest-knight Hospitaler repeatedly point out to Balian.

One scene crystallizes this entire message. When Balian confides in the Hospitaller Knight that he fears he has lost his religion, the knight responds in a way that shocks the young man – and perhaps the audience, as it comes from a holy man. But it lays out the great message of the film:

I put no stock in religion. By the word religion I have seen the lunacy of fanatics of every denomination be called the will of God. I’ve seen too much religion in the eyes of too many murderers. Holiness is in right action, and courage on behalf of those who cannot defend themselves. And goodness — what God desires — is here (points to head) and here (points to heart). And by what you decide to do every day, you will be a good man. Or not.

Low Point

Balian repeatedly states that his only goal is to be “a good knight.” From this, multiple people respond in shock, with reactions along the lines of, “A perfect knight? Good heavens!” As in, who does he think he is??

But he never says “perfect.” Never once. Just “good.”

It makes me want to pull my hair out.

Standout Performance

Marton Csokas, who played Celeborn in The Lord of the Rings and who auditioned for the part of Balian in this film, makes for a truly memorable and despicable villain as Guy de Lusignan, head of the Templar Knights. When he’s not sneering on a scale perhaps not seen since Basil Rathbone in the 1938 Robin Hood or scheming against our hero, he’s throwing hissy fits or issuing catastrophically bad orders to his army. In a movie with so many good-guy supporting characters, Csokas shines in his own darkness.

Overall Evaluation as a Movie and as Fantasy/SF/Sword & Sorcery

While not as much a Fantasy film as some others, Kingdom of Heaven contains enough Medieval battles, one-on-one sword fights, supernatural forces and general derring-do to place it alongside the best of that genre. Throw in the entire moral and ethical layer, and the film achieves masterpiece status.

Just treat that theatrical cut like the leper it is!

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Van Allen Plexico is a member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), a Grand Master of Pulp Literature (2025 class) and a multiple-award-winning author of more than two dozen novels and anthologies, ranging from space opera to Kaiju to crime fiction to superheroes to military SF. He notably edited, co-created and co-wrote the Sword and Sorcery anthology GIDEON CAIN: DEMON HUNTER. Find all of his works on Amazon and at Plexico.net.