Wednesday, May 18, 2005

Kingdom of Heaven

Saw KoH last night and I know that Cloud was rather disappointed by it. Most of the reviews too seem very unimpressed.

Maybe I am easily pleased (nothing to do with Orlando Bloom either - I would rather leave than take frankly). I actually thought it was okay, and the last hour or so really kept me going.

Yes, the opening section is rather plodding: too much scene setting for narrative we don't really care about. Liam Neeson's part was too brief to be emotionally meaningful and too dominant to ditch without needing substantial reworking of the whole film. We could have easily lost the utterly pointless love story. A good 45 mins shorter and this would have been a cracking action history flick. So what if the platitudes on religion and politics were heavy-handed?: it was at least a positive to see them. And having grown up on all those films about "white men are good; non-white men are evil murderers", it was rather more inspiring to see one that showed good and bad on all sides, good and bad actions from good and bad people. It may have had a Gladiator: Part Deux feel to it, but that's not entirely a bad thing.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

argh i knew it. and i thought maybe the reviews were just biased against orlando bloom. anyway i've put you up too. i need to read more unbiased movie reviews from bloggers, not advertised opinions with links to buy the merchandise even.

Lisa Rullsenberg said...

I cannot claim to be an unbiased reviewer, but I'm not driven by the need to sell products and I'll generally try and give enough of an indication why the film was good/bad to inform readers about whether it may be worth seeing.