Kingdom of Heaven - review

Ridley Scott has reached new depths with his latest historical epic. Plot holes? Scott makes stories out of them these days - there's more hole than plot.

He has discovered, or perhaps he just doesn't care anymore, that the majority of a modern audience will be satisfied if something appears to have meaning, even if it clearly does not. If it sounds good and looks good, that's good enough for Scott and it's good enough for most others, too.

I was astonished by the absurdity of some moments in the story. The final one - making the film one, gigantic anti-climax - is where our hero, Balian, having lead many of his men to their own slaughter, surrenders up the city with barely a flicker of conscience. He really doesn't seem all that bothered - in fact, he seems pretty pleased with himself. And as he announces their surrender, his men slap him on the back (as if Robin Hood's merry men had just seen their leader shoot a particularly fine arrow into a lump of wood) - the logic here being their intention was only ever to save the people.

The fact that they had plenty of opportunity to escape before the battle seems not to bother Scott, or Balian.

At no point in the story did any of the characters seem to be struggling with an internal battle of conscience, or a crisis of belief. Surely a film about the Crusades has to revolve around a conflict of beliefs, external and internal. At no point did any of the characters dislpay any kind of sophistication of thought, like they did in the good old days of historical epics.

This is what happens when you write a script to a formula - the pieces all appear to be there but, upon closer inspection, we discover they're from different puzzles.

Please, Keep Mentioning the War

A German friend emailed me a link to an article accusing us British of being obsessed with the war. This is my reply...

"What a load of self-pitying bollocks. Oh dear, boohoo, poor little Germans, feeling sorry for themselves.

He's already lost the argument before he's started, saying "we Germans". What all of you? I see you guys haven't come very far - another German thinks he has the authority to speak for his entire nation.

So all "us Brits" wallow in triumphalism, do we? What, even the Indians, the Bangladeshis, the Pakistanis, the West Indians, the Scots, the Irish, the Welsh, the people from African nations, the people from East European nations, the Greeks, the Turks and on. Hmm, possibly some of them. Well, they were all involved in whipping your ass, too.

If you celebrate the defeat of the Nazis, why don't you join us then? If you watch war films (I watched Patton last night) most of the time the enemy is refered to as the Nazis (although Patton had a liking for "the Hun" too).

The reason we love celebrating the defeat of the Nazis is they were such fantastic bad guys. You Germans should be proud of having created them. They were perfect. In fact, no work of fiction could ever have created anything as good.

We don't celebrate beating you in the WW1 do we? Even though we pretty much did that on our own (no Russia, they bottled it, France can hardly be counted as they're French, and America only turned up for the after show party), but do we go on about that one? No - it's more of a general feeling of "what a waste of human life" (Oh What A Lovely War, All Quiet On The Western Front etc), and always constantly refering to the football match that Christmas between our boys and your boys.

Triumphalism eh? Bollocks.

We're just glad we beat the Nazis. And you are too, apparently, so what's the problem? Perhaps it's not entirely true. Perhaps you do allow yourselves an occasional "what if we'd won". Maybe that would have been better than this decades of feeling guilty.

I'm sure there are some Brits who think all Germans are Nazis. I'm sure there are some Indians who think all Brits are imperialists. I saw a Bollywood film called Lagaan where the Brits were all portrayed moustache twiddling, Indian beating, bad guys. It was uncomfortable sitting in a cinema full of Indians, I must admit. But I don't go around saying "poor me, having to be made feel to guilty for my country's history".

In fact, I feel sorry for the Indian villagers, having to put up with those English aristocratic bastards and their henchmen.

Still, the Nazis managed to unleash more unrestrained violence and horror in half a decade than we managed in about 200 odd years of empire building. At least we left a few railways and buildings behind. You guys trashed everything on the way in, made sure of it on the way out, and left a huge mountain of bodies everywhere you went, by way of a "thanks for having me" gift. Please don't compare the Nazis to the British Empire builders - although thanks to them we now look quite nice, really.

And now we're getting stick because we didn't jump into a war with the Nazis at the first opportunity. Wait a minute! You can't have it both ways. Chamberlain was trying everything he could to avoid war - like Hans Blix (however you spell it).

Oh, and we're still celebrating winning the Battle of Britain. Oh, sorry. Yeah, we shouldn't really be fussed. Yeah, a few guys who really did not want to be fighting a war (unlike WW1) found themselves climbing into planes they barely knew how to fly, half of whom ended up burning to death. If they hadn't, who knows if the Nazis could have gone on to take England and the empire, providing plenty of oilfields to fuel those tanks in Russia. Would Russia have saved our arses then? Maybe, but probably not.

Perhaps this guy should feel sorry for those guys who burnt to death to save him from the Nazis, instead of moaning about how poor, sensitive little Germans have to go round feeling guilty all their lives. Big fucking deal."

I must have had too much coffee that day.