The Epic: Kingdom of Heaven: Director's Cut (Dir Ridley Scott, 3h19m, 2005)

The Epics of the 2000s are a different beast from those of the 1950s and 1960s, the 1980s or even the 1990s; the end of the 20th century would see a resurgence in epic cinema, from historical films such as Braveheart and Last of the Mohicans to crime-Martin Scorsese's duology of Goodfellas and Casino, and even dramatic epics like Titanic and Legends of the Fall. Even the Western made a return via Wyatt Earp and Tombstone. The 1990s though, was to be the last great decade of the epic as it had been, as colossal cinematic undertaking in front and behind camera featuring gigantic sets and casts of thousands adding to the scale of pictures considering everything from the Anglo-Scottish wars of the Middle Ages to the sinking of the RMS Titanic. 

Titanic would mark the end of one cycle, and the beginning of the next; matching a cast of 200 extras, a 1/8 scale model of the ship, and cutting edge CGI to model the ship during climatic sequences and populate it with computer generated passengers for shots where a real life model set sail. In its wake would come a whole new way of making epics; where colossal landscapes and thousands of extras were once needed, teams of visual effects artists could replace them; in places, such as Peter Jackson's seminal The Lord of the Rings trilogy, so the work of Weta Workshop matched real-life sets, impressive CGI work, including armies created by the MASSIVE engine to do battle, and intricately detailed models, often sharing scenes such as in The Two Towers' Battle of Helm's Deep. 

Equally impressive would be Ridley Scott's recreation of Rome in 2nd Century AD and the rebirth of the sword and sandal genre in Gladiator; this would, in turn, launch a whole empire of historical pictures, among them Troy, Alexander the Great, The Last Samurai, and Scott's next epic, 2005's Kingdom of Heaven, in which Orlando Bloom's blacksmith turned knight, Balian, enters the complex world of 12th Century Jerusalem's politics, power struggle, and conflict against the forces of Saladin (Ghassan Massoud). Largely mauled on release, like a couple of Scott's best known films and a number of the films I've just listed, it is in its director's cut, adding back on nearly an hour, that the film is "complete" once more; it is this return to Scott's original vision that we will consider today.

What Kingdom of Heaven is not short of is scale, and stars. This is apparent from the off, beginning in Balian's village, a set built in its entirety around a local castle, as Balian struggles with the death of his wife, and the jealousy of his brother, the local priest (Michael Sheen). With the arrival of Baron Godfrey (Liam Neeson) back from Crusade, soon revealed to be Bailin's father, so violence soon erupts, and Godfrey and his dwindling forces, including David Thewlis' knight Hospiliter, with Balian in tow, head for the Holy Land, the former blacksmith eventually arriving in Jerusalem now the Lord of Ibelin. Here, once more, the scale of sets, even embellished as they are for much of the film by CGI, are impressive, made even more so by the fact that much of the walls defended in the film's climax are a fully-built set.

Within Jerusalem, Balian finds factions vying for the holy city: he has already met a major figure in one of the factions, Saladin's general, Imad (Alexander Siddig), in disguise, on the road to the city, and once in the city, William Monahan (later to write the equally grandiose The Departed)'s script introduces us to the major figures in the city. Struggling for power are the Templars, led by Guy of Lusignan (an impressively nasty and power hungry Marton Csokas), and his henchman, the bloodthirsty Raynald of Châtillon (Brendan Gleeson), whose supporters want all out war against Saladin and his massing army, and the forces that are struggling to keep the peace, led by Tiberias (Jeremy Irons). 

Ruling over the city is the leper King Baldwin IV, a career-best performance from Edward Norton, conducted almost entirely from behind an ornate mask; the performance is certainly mannered; there is something distinctly otherwordly about this figure veilled and swathed in bandages as he slowly succumbs to his disease-despite this being straight out of the historical record. Norton plays Baldwin as a noble and godly man against the squabbling forces of his court. We see him come to Raynard's rescue as the forces of Saladin bear down upon the castle he controls; this sequence is perhaps the closest the film comes to articulating its central message, of intelligent men understanding each other on separate sides of the war. It is also the film at its most visually arresting, Saladin's forces blocking out an entire hillside, whilst, out of the dust, led by a colossal golden cross, so "Jerusalem has come", the conflict only delayed, not put to rest.

Meanwhile, his sister, (Eva Green), is where the theatrical cut and the director's cut most differ; the latter not only marks out Sybella as a far more ruthless and pragmatic figure, it also makes more than Balian's love interest, a power in Jerusalem in her own right and every bit as shrewd as her brother. The director's cut also adds tragedy to her life, as her young son, next in line for the throne of the city is seen to be suffering from the same illness as his uncle. This is also where the problems with the film begin; the love story is, whilst fleshed out in Scott's three hour cut, still unengaging. Bloom is a decent actor, getting down the pragmatic qualities of a smith and engineer, and the dutiful knight. Less well acted is his struggle with faith, that really goes nowhere other than to juxtapose against the film's more driven supporting characters. 

What he is not, up until the film's last quarter is remotely charismatic, at which point he's become the last man standing. As a result, the film's pace, even with the more complex narrative of the director's cut, often drags when we are with Balian rather than the film's other major and decidedly more interesting characters. It is a flaw that, for all the work that the director's cut does, leaves Kingdom of Heaven as a good, not great historical action film. Nevertheless, it is an epic, made far grander by its restoration to its full length, in which the old-and new-ways of making an epic are matched with a grand and exciting tale of war, power, and chivalry.

 Rating: Highly Recommended

Kingdom of Heaven is available on DVD and BluRay from ‎Walt Disney Pictures; the Theatrical Cut is available for streaming on Disney+

We end the Epic Season in the footsteps of Joquain Phoenix's Napoleon in Ridley Scott's biopic of the general and Emperor.