(Scott 2005) Kingdom of Heaven

06-05-03 VIEW (Scott 2005) Kingdom of Heaven

The plot is lift­ed straight out of Wal­ter Scott’s The Tal­is­man. The char­ac­ters spout ridicu­lous speech­es, espous­ing mod­ern sen­ti­ments, which would be high­ly improb­a­ble com­ing out of the mouths of twelfth-cen­tu­ry peo­ple. But who cares? The bat­tle sequences at the end are mag­nif­i­cent. Medieval siege tech­niques, with rolling siege tow­ers and tre­buchets, were every bit as spec­tac­u­lar as mod­ern attacks with smart bombs and mis­siles. Visu­ally, the his­tor­i­cal detail seems fair­ly accu­rate to me. Rid­dley Scott always does some­thing worth look­ing at, even if he some­times has struc­tural prob­lems in sto­ry-telling. Visu­ally, his instincts are always on the mark.


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