Kingdom of Heaven (Director's Cut) [Blu-ray]

Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven is a sweeping historical epic that offers much more than just sword fights and grand battles. Set during the Crusades of the 12th century, the film follows Balian (Orlando Bloom), a humble blacksmith who rises to nobility and becomes a key figure in the defense of Jerusalem.Visually, the movie is spectacular. The cinematography, costume design, and large-scale battle scenes are truly cinematic. Scott knows how to craft a historical world that feels immersive and lived-in. The score by Harry Gregson-Williams also adds weight and emotion to key scenes.The Director’s Cut is the version to watch—it adds significant character development and plot depth, especially around the politics of Jerusalem, making the story much more coherent and engaging.Highlights:Orlando Bloom delivers a surprisingly grounded and emotional performance.Eva Green, Jeremy Irons, and Ghassan Massoud bring depth and nuance to their roles.The film balances action with thoughtful discussions on faith, tolerance, and power—themes that still resonate today.Minor downsides:The theatrical version can feel rushed and lacks the depth of the Director’s Cut.Some historical liberties are taken, so it's best enjoyed as historical fiction rather than fact.Overall: Kingdom of Heaven is an ambitious and beautifully made film that blends action with philosophy. If you enjoy historical dramas with moral complexity and epic scale, this one’s worth adding to your collection—especially in its full-length version.

One of my favorite movies in recent years~ one I can watch over and over and still enjoy it. The acting is superb, the story compelling, and the setting magnificent. The battle scenes are exciting and realistic, imo. This was a fascinating era full of larger-than-life historical figures, both good and bad, and I highly recommend it.

The Kingdom of Heaven – Director’s Cut (KOHDC) is not one, but it is many magnitudes of cuts higher than its Theatrical version. The theater-released version is 2 hours long because it had to be recut in order to fit into the standard cinema complex time mold. Good films often can’t be whittled down to conform to movie theater time shifts of every 2 hours. The Kingdom of Heaven – Director’s Cut is one of these films.With nondescript box office ratings, Ridley Scott went into rescue/ triage mode to resurrect a movie that no one had ever heard of and changed it into one of the best current films about the Knights Templar and other Knights factions escorting wealthy Christians from Europe to the Holy land – Jerusalem. He did this by adding back 51 critical minutes that were initially pruned from the box-office edition. This crucial information transformed the film because it filled back in important character and storyline details that had been felled, so that viewers could make sense of this entire story/ film.I know this first-hand, because before I bought this KOHDC version, I had originally bought the 2-disc DVD (and played it on our BluRay player, which made every part of the DVD film crystal-clear). While watching this version, I had questions about the storyline. Then, when I bought and watched the Director’s Cut, the movie made sense AND because of the BluRay HD, every scene was deep, super-defined, and it was as if I were in the scenes as an observer (which is what the BluRay experience does to viewers). One good thing about the DVD KOH set, though, is the inclusion of extra film and film-related information, which is missing from the 1-disc BluRay. So for film enthusiasts who want to have every bit of film product possible to experience, I would suggest buying both systems and watching them like I did – from simple, truncated film DVD (144 minutes) along with the 2nd disc extras, to the expanded but clarified KOHDC in BluRay (195 minutes), with the original, almost-1 hour added back.KOHDC has a stellar international cast, including: Liam Neeson, Orlando Bloom, (pre-‘Bond Girl’) Eva Green, Jeremy Irons, and Edward Norton, whose name wasn’t listed in the credits but who gave an outstanding performance while masked! Another stellar cast-mate is Syrian writer, actor, director, and filmmaker, Ghassan Massoud, well-known and respected in the Arab World, playing the legendary Salahuddin in this film. (He was also in the Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.) Western audiences need to see more work from this man.The storyline loosely follows history, starting when a blacksmith in France who lost his wife kills his half-brother, meets his real father (a Knight Templar), and journeys with him to Jerusalem to escape being tried for fratricide. The journey itself is arduous, and on the wide screen, it is epic, both on land and the sea. The raison d’tre of the Templars is to provide a safe Christian escort for wealthy European Christians traversing a hostile route. Upon arrival but outside of the city, which is rural, there is peace, calm, and tranquility for wealthy Knights who have homesteads there, with sprawling desert irrigation systems. This contrasts to the dangerous and barbarous activities occurring inside of Jerusalem in the battles between 2 different religions and between 2 different sects of 1 religion. The battle scenes are gruesome as is the dealing with the spoils of war on all sides.This religious fighting takes on a sense of cognitive dissonance: How can any religion have its members kill in the name of God? On the other hand, how can any religion not kill in the name of politics and wealth accumulation to gain land and new members to join its ranks? Why would a person go through any monotheistic religious conversion to engage in these? How could there be any jockeying of power between any 2 religious sects of the same religion? These are serious questions for viewers of this film to think about and discuss. These questions are still unanswered when we turn on our news even today and see what is happening between the East and the West.The cinematography is epic: the journey to Jerusalem on land and at sea, the battlefields, and the castle defense scenes.If the viewer has at least some knowledge of religious history and the birth pangs of each of the 2 religions, geography, cultures, etc., this film might be viewed as an action film. However, for those of us who have lived and traveled in these places, this film makes our real-life, current-day experiences especially strong and personally-relevant, even many centuries later because our everyday lives there still live and breathe this history. Our experience, instead of viewing this film as an action film, then, is displaced by living our own lives there, woven into the fabric of these countries with strong histories of survival, echoes of which still ring true for us through: religious, social, political, and intercultural viewpoints. In sum, some of us have lived through scenes today similar to what is shown on TV or internet newscasts during their international news segments.The sets, cinematography, and storyline are all noteworthy, and the fact that this film (loosely) follows history, much of which is still happening today, is remarkable in that the issues besetting the people living during the Crusades are some of the same unresolved problems that we still have today. The question is: ‘why’.I highly recommend seeing both sets of this KOH film (the 2-disc DVD and the KOHDC 1-disc in BluRay). I also highly recommend sharing these films with family and friends and discussing them to engage in dialog that prompts critical thinking and problem-solving. Our world desperately needs this right now.