You Should Definitely Watch the Director's Cut of Kingdom of Heaven

Kingdom of Heaven. Image courtesy of 20th Century Fox.

You may not remember Ridley Scott’s 2005 historical epic Kingdom of Heaven. If you do, you may remember that when it came out critics didn’t like it and it struggled to make back its enormous budget of $130 million. Rarely can it be said that a bad 144 minute movie is made better by the addition of 50 more minutes of material. But in this case it can. Of course, Ridley Scott has a history of improving his films with the release of a director’s cut so I suppose we shouldn’t have been surprised.

Kingdom of Heaven stars Orlando Bloom, who at the time was fresh from the success of Pirates of the Caribbean and Lord of the Rings and was one of the most famous actors in the world, as a blacksmith who gets caught up in the Crusades. He ends up leading the Crusaders as they defend the city of Jerusalem against Saladin and his armies who are trying to take it. This leads to one of those great movie lines that you can’t tell if its brilliant or stupid when Saladin says: “What is Jerusalem worth? Nothing. Everything.” Well, OK then.

I’ll be honest, at 194 minutes I cannot remember everything that happened in Kingdom of Heaven. And it’s been quite a long time since I watched it. But what I do remember is that, after watching the Director’s Cut, I felt like I’d experienced something. As I have noted previously, one of Ridley Scott’s great gifts is his ability to carefully and immaculately build a cinematic world that engulfs the viewers. Gladiator did it brilliantly, but almost all of his most memorable films, and especially the historical epics, create a textured reality that feels real and lived in and convey a tactile sense of experience that goes right through the screen.

And that’s what you get in Kingdom of Heaven. Yes, it is long and convoluted and messy, but so is history. And Ridley Scott is basically trying to capture the grand sweep of history in this film. And you feel it, once the film had time to properly breathe and marinate in his original vision. The studio obviously panicked at releasing a 194 minute theatrical cut, but if they didn’t have the stones to see this through they really shouldn’t have hired Ridley Scott to direct a sweeping historical epic about the Crusades. That’s as dumb as hiring David Ayer to write a film and expecting anything other than a facile story about goods guys who are sometimes kinda bad, but basically good.

The world building is everything in Kingdom of Heaven. Yes, it does try to say some things about religion and history and violence and so forth, admirably summed up in that confounding everything-nothing line which, if you are into those kind of grad school histrionics, you could no doubt plumb for some meaning about the dichotomy of Man and God or some shit like that. But don’t be fooled. Kingdom of Heaven, starring Legolas, is not really about that. It’s about using the medium of cinema to do that thing which it is so ideally suited for: recreating a world and a place and a vision of history increasingly remote from where we stand in the sweep of time’s arrow.