Hollywood worried, "Kingdom" a dud
The QandO Blog
Posted by: McQ
Tuesday, May 10, 2005
Sharon Waxman of the NYT tells us that Hollywood is worried about the recent decline of box office sales:
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Now Hollywood is starting to get worried.
The poor box-office performance last weekend of the first major film of the summer, "Kingdom of Heaven," released by 20th Century Fox, made for 11 weeks in a row of declining movie attendance and revenue compared with last year, adding up to the longest slump since 2000 and raising an uncomfortable question: Are people turning away from lackluster movies, or turning their backs on the whole business of going to theaters?
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I'd go with the "lackluster movies" choice. From what I've read, "Kingdom of Heaven" is one heck of a revisionist history dud. Ridley Scott, apparently, felt it necessary to tell the story of the Crusades from a point of view that favors the Muslim version instead of the Christian version (or just the historic version).
Not a smart business move in today's political atmosphere, but it should do well when released in the Middle East. One reviewer even noted that it would appear that "Kingdom of Heaven" is Scott's attempt at attonement for "Black Hawk Down" from which he caught a lot of grief from Muslims. One critic (Jonathan Riley-Smith)labeled Kingdom the "Osama bin Laden version of history".
James Pinkerton at Newsday said:
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Scott can make any kind of movie he wants, of course, but in the middle of a war in the Middle East, he might have been wise to make his tale more fair and balanced.
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But more importantly, I think Tom Neven gets to the heart of this film's problem:
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Neven lamented that "distinctly 21st century views on religion" had been imposed on the film. Thus much of the historical-religious context of the film was leached away. As Neven explained of the Christian and Muslim combatants, "as for the distinctiveness of their respective faiths, you'd never know what they were fighting about."
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That point brings us to a good discussion in the Pinkerton review about revisionist history and the 'good/evil' dichotomy in movies:
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That was a big mistake, commercially as well as historically. By contrast, the three "Lord of the Rings" movies were huge successes, because they presented a sharp moral worldview, of good pitted against evil. Gandalf and the Hobbits vs. Sauron and the Orcs: You knew which side you were on. Yes, the "Rings" villains sometimes possessed a dangerous dark-side appeal, but the trilogy kept a distinct moral voice that audiences appreciated-indeed, yearned for.
It's easy to preserve the good-evil dichotomy in a work of complete fantasy such as "Rings." The task gets tougher when real historical events are being envisioned, and revisioned. Once upon a time, Hollywood could blithely make cowboys-and-Indians movies in which white people massacred red people, as audiences - white ones, at least - cheered.
But then came a revised history, and the general sense that Native Americans were the victims, not the enemy. That historical wheel had turned completely by 1970, when Hollywood released "Little Big Man," in which the red men were saintly, while the whites were either comical, or, in the case of Gen. George Custer, genocidal.
A similar process has been at work in regard to U.S.-Mexican history. The 1960 version of "The Alamo" starred John Wayne as an unabashedly heroic Davy Crockett. The 2004 "Alamo," on the other hand, so muddled the historical-political backdrop that there was nobody to root for - and so nobody bought a ticket.
Nowadays, historical revisionism and political correctness - and also, maybe, fear of Muslim reprisals - might make it impossible to film an epic in which "good" Christians vanquish "bad" Muslims. In which case, moviemakers will probably have to drop the whole genre, at least for American audiences. So it will be interesting to see how Hollywood handles flicks about the Iraq war.
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It will indeed be interesting to see how they handle the Iraq war movies. Hopefully much more truthfully than the cartoons they did about Vietnam.
Anyway, the lesson in all of this? If you want to make an epic, quit revising history and show both sides as they were, warts and all. And quit worrying about offending people. Do you suppose Mel Gibson would have made "The Passion" if he was worried some might be offended?
Last but not least, understand that while, as Pinkerton says, you're entitled to make any kind of movie you care to make, we, the movie going public are free to reject any movie you make for any reason. One of those reasons might be we're just not interested in Hollywood's politically correct version of history.
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nytimes.com
newsday.com |
