Ain’t War Grand?

Balian (Orlando Bloom) in the thick of battle in the film Kingdom of Heaven. Courtesy Twientieth Century Fox.

The swarming warriors in today’s historical epics fill the screen side to side, top to bottom, and they keep multiplying like sea monkeys. The battling crowds were big in Troy, massive in Alexander, and now, in Kingdom of Heaven, CGI at last allows a filmmaker to realize his vision of an invading throng of — and this is a technical term — several kazillion.

Size matters to Ridley Scott, director of all things sweeping, including Blade Runner, Gladiator and TV commercials. But he’s good when he thinks small, too, as he did a few years ago with Black Hawk Down, the (relatively) modest film about American soldiers in Somalia. That movie must have felt constricting, because Scott is all stretched out again with a two-and-a-half-hour epic about the Crusades, which he sets in 1184, in the years leading to the Third Crusade, when Christians fought Muslims for control of Jerusalem.

Wait, teenage girls! Stop yawning: one of the bloody brigades is led by neutered heartthrob Orlando Bloom, that jellyfish-skinned, powder-puffed elf from The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Bloom plays Balian, a French blacksmith whose wife has committed suicide. Talk about good timing; just as her corpse is being decapitated and sent to hell, Balian’s long-lost father appears on horseback with a proposition for his bastard son. Godfrey of Ibelin, a popular knight played by Liam Neeson with girth and good humour, invites Balian to join him in the holy land where “you are not what you were born, but what you have it in your heart to be.” No, they’re not riding those horses to the land of West Side Story, but to Jerusalem, though it sounds a little like Rita Moreno’s “A-med-ee-ka.”

Kingdom of Heaven tells us that before the Third Crusade, the magnanimous, leprosy-ridden King Baldwin IV (Edward Norton, eerie beneath a silver goalie mask) and the equally peacenik Muslim leader Saladin (Ghassan Massoud) managed to orchestrate a fragile peace between Muslims and Christians. In reality, the free-to-be-you-and-me holy land existed for a blink, but Scott milks the metaphoric possibilities of those years, turning — and this is an achievement — the Crusades into a hey-Bush! appeal for multilateralism and tolerance.

Scott is in prescriptive mode, nobly pleading for a kinder, softer war in brutal times. But with all that clanking armour and the director’s usual atmosphere of dread — light is only permitted when it pierces darkness; snow drifts like ash — it’s sort of strange when hatred is neutered by negotiation. Two rival leaders gallop towards each other; just when swords should be lopping off heads, they talk treaties.

Bloom is a natural fit to pilot the new, improved Crusade (now with sensitivity!). Despite the loud churnings of the publicity machine, he’s not a star yet; his presence is negligible. Not quite as wispy as Leonardo DiCaprio, but with the same peachy skin and small mouth — unnervingly mute for several opening scenes — Bloom is just as uninteresting. The reluctant hero is a little too reluctant, a boy-man grappling with a few spiritual doubts who trots off to battle because he has nothing better to do; in modern times, he’d buy a Eurail pass, drink some foreign coffee, get laid and go back to his job at Kinko’s. In fact, that’s not far from what happens in Kingdom of Heaven, except that instead of going for coffee, he slaughters some evil Christians and Muslims (he’s all about equal opportunity).

Perhaps Bloom suffers by comparison because Papa Godfrey is one fierce knight. Teaching his sylph-like son how to wield a sword, he notes, “I once fought two days with an arrow through my testicle.” Alas, the apple falls far from the tree, and Balian maintains a remoteness that’s none too chief-like even as he’s called upon to take up his father’s mantle and lead the way to battle, and to peace. Two-and-a-half hours should be plenty of time to watch a boy transition into a man, but Balian’s inner struggle is strangely invisible, except for a little brooding at the Mount of Olives. Why, then, do grateful citizens quickly take off their hats when he passes and put up with — even encourage — his bland speechifying? One misses the certainty of Gladiator’s Russell Crowe, who catapulted to leadership with a fiery sense of right.

Sibylla (Eva Green) and Balian (Orlando Bloom) share a moment of passion. Courtesy Twentieth Century Fox.

Scott crowds things with a silly love story — Balian falls for the king’s sister (Eva Green), who is married to warmonger Guy de Lusignan (Martin Csokas) – and a multitude of half-formed supporting characters, including Jeremy Irons as a disillusioned military advisor to the king and Brendan Gleeson as Reynald de Chatillon, a bloodthirsty Christian extremist with the hair of Charlie Brown’s Little Red Headed Girl.

Kingdom of Heaven isn’t as mechanical as Troy or as ridiculous as Alexander. Scott wages beautiful war: arrows fly through the air like a plague of locusts; firebombs dropping at night on the holy city resemble, of course, Baghdad under siege. But recent historical epics have been dulled by sheer scale; the faster the rivers of blood flow, and the wider the armies grow, the less compelling the stories seem to become. Lawrence of Arabia’s desert might look puny by today’s standards (actually, it still looks pretty good), but the story had a richness and humanity that all the technical polish in the world can’t bring out in Kingdom of Heaven. The film is strangely insubstantial, despite its visual heft. Scott has made an optimistic allegory enacted by wishy-washy warriors. Without understanding religious fury, it is impossible to understand the Crusades; and Jerusalem, past and present, remains a mystery.

Kingdom of Heaven opens across Canada on May 6.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.