You mean the movie that had Guy de Lusignan as a Templar (when he was by then consort King already) and Orlando Bloom teaching Levant Arabs how and where to dig wells?
It's almost as jarring as the "King Arthur" film's Nazi Saxons, even for history amateurs like me.
It's one of the most well-made Medieval movies around, I think (except for some occasional obscure or indie films, I'm talking Hollywood big budget movies). If you take out the bits that they made up that don't fit (mostly Balian being a French smith that travels to the Levant) and the parts that were pushed by
obligatory protagonist with Messiah-like features, the movie is quite solid. Both the imagery and the themes are very well-worked. Especially in the extended cut, where Baldwin V appears and Eva Greene gets more character developent (actually, she gets all the character development that the studios decided to cut).
Some people have attacked the movie by the unconventional religiosity of some of its characters, like the Round Table-like morality of Balian and the wierd pantheism that the Hospitaler character (fittingly unnamed even in the credits) expresses, but I don't think it's inaccurate, I think it's a very well-thought development of Christian worldview that did develop very rarely in the Levant (that we know of) and, especially, in urban European areas with the Free Spirit brotherhood and the Beguine movement.
Guy of Lusignan and Reynald of Chatillon being "Templars" isn't so much an inaccuracy than a concession to the profanes in the audience. Given that Hollywood producers are over-concerned about today's attention-disorder-affected audiences and need to keep things simple and not have two characters named in a similar manner (They changed Mel Gibson's wife name in Braveheart from Marian to Murron because they thought they'd confuse
this Marian with
the other Marian, Robin Hood's Maid Marian; in this very film, Kingdom of Heaven, they decided to change the name Raymond, the Count of Tripoli, for Tiberias, because Raymond and Reynald sound too similar and the popcorn-and-pepsi crowd might get confused.) I can't blame them. Behind Kingdom of Heaven there's a team of writers that did make their research and some studio producers that screwed what could have been the ultimate view of the Crusades in the big screen. The writers inserted fitting themes into the movie and they did spot the great questions of the day: the conflict between old Crusader dynasties who wanted to settle in, make roots and seek peace, and the new Crusaders who came in for the glory and the booty and also for Heaven. They only needed to point out the irony of the Kingdom of Jerusalem to make it a perfect, round, thematic movie: the irony of needing the flow of European crusaders to defend it, only to let these newcomers destroy it by being bold and relentless, unforgiving and uncompromising, which is what could have saved Jerusalem in the first place.
The movie needed only that, and Balian not being a French blacksmith. But because of studio meddling and movie conventions, Balian had to be an everyday man turned knight because the protagonist always has to be an everyday man in every big budget Hollywood movie. They're afraid people won't connect with the main character if they don't have an everyday main character.
Also, super-well-researched movies have never been the norm, but after Alexander the Great was such a humongous flop, studios decided never again to let a film follow historical sources. They suck and they are audience-repellants. They should have focused on why Alexander was crap: they chose a bad actor for the role, they had the wrong focus on his life and it was overly long. And the director's cut doesn't help: it only shows more Bagoas, instead of more character development. KoH's team was dedicated and knew about the Crusader States. The same cannot be said about the new Robin Hood, which was a complete, absolute, total disaster of a movie, a nonsense from start to finish, a stupid, absurd, boring and generic Medieval crap adventure that didn't make justice to Robin Hood, to Medieval timer or to its own idea of seeking out the other side of the Robin Hood story. Which was Scott's original idea: to have the Sheriff be the main character and show him as an agent of progress from a government that wanted to end feudal conflict and abuse, and which needed taxes to do so. Robin Hood was a man who fought against this because freedom, but who had it all wrong from the beginning. This seems like a good idea (although a bit too "swing of the pendulum", if you know what I mean), but studios meddled again and we got bullshit Robin Hood instead.
Why do I always ramble off-topic stuff like this? Sorry, sorry.
