All about faith
HISTORY REVISITED: Orlando Bloom in full bloom in The Kingdom of Heaven.
Kingdom of Heaven
Genre: Historical
The cast: Orlando Bloom, Liam Neeson and Eva Green.
The director: Ridley Scott
The storyline: Of Crusades centred on Jerusalem.
The bottomline: Grand spectacle
Many, Many summers, ago when America was not quite the villain for so many, Ridley Scott made bold to make a film, technologically supreme and almost dispassionate in his horizon. There was that odd juxtaposing of Quranic verses with war crimes though.
The film, "Black Hawk Down," set in Somalia in the midst of civil strife and U.S. intervention, did not set box office records. But with great attention to detail, the "Gladiator" director was able to present his case as a man who can go beyond technical sophistry.
In "Kingdom of Heaven" he gets bolder and dares to talk of Crusades at a time when uneasy peace seems to prevail between Muslims and Christians.
The result? A film so spectacular, a show so mesmerising. A film that has emotional depth and the width of vision too. Go for it because Orlando has untamed energy that is infectious, because the canvas is grand, and the vision grander. Yes, the pace seems slow, the war scenes and the desert cities quite familiar. But the scale is impressive. Scott has his head in the right place. His movie is about faith, not religion.
ZIYA US SALAM
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