Review of Kingdom of Heaven (2005) by Harry W — 21 Jul 2013

Kingdom of Heaven was a film many told me would be good, alas I feel disconnected with their opinions now.

Kingdom of Heaven doesn't really feature a compelling story, or a new one for that matter since its been told hundreds of times in all kinds of other films to this day. It's just about another man moving across the land until he finds a home, falls in love and leads a war. It isn't that interesting and frankly is a lesser success of telling this kind of story, because Ridley Scott doesn't capture the heart of the story as a director and burdens the film with many similar technical issues he allowed on GI Jane, with the key focus being the poor lighting which leaves the visual quality being a rough and dark colour which is more monochromatic than acceptable for a big-budget story of this scale. It make things blank, dark and grey, and therefore not a visually appealing film.

And the lead actor isn't right for the part. Orlando Bloom portrays the charisma for a character on an adventure, but since Kingdom of Heaven is a historical epic, the best word to describe him would be miscast. He tries, but he doesn't try hard enough or recognise that he is no longer in The Lord of The Rings, and so this historical epic is dragged into some form of action-adventure and historical drama hybrid led by an inappropriate performance.

The main problem was that since Kingdom of Heaven wasn't a compelling story, it couldn't capture my interest and essentially the entire time was just a massive bore.

What few benefits were left over were that the action was mostly entertaining, particularly the awesome final sequence which was entertaining on a large scale.

And some of the acting was good, primarily Eva Green, Edward Norton and in particular, Jeremy Irons.

But all that aside, I was thoroughly bored by Kingdom of Heaven and is not a film I would recommend for its adventure, story or the fact that it was directed by Ridley Scott, because I felt really let down by him.