This movie, like "Troy," seemed to have been planned because of the success of "Gladiator." Yet they are all bad.
One comment on Troy. I rather enjoyed Troy, despite its short-comings, because the individual characters as characters - Achilles, Hector, Paris, Priam, Odysseus, Agamemnon, were well portrayed, reasonably well acted, and recognizable to those who knew the Iliad.
But what they did to the story, oh my! A ten year's war is turned into a three week's war. The gods are excised and Hector is presented as a rational disbeliever. Nothing made any sense except Hector's determination to defend his people and Paris' quest to redeem his cowardice.
Having Hector kill Menelaos in the second week of the war would have been as startling to a Greek as if Mel Gibson had filmed a version of The Passion where Jesus got assassinated on Palm Sunday and Judas took over leadership and got crucified instead of Jesus.
It's truly as if Hollywood has a list of Six Acceptable Motivations for Action (all PC vetted), and any plot that doesn't pass muster - that is to say, EVERY plot written before 1985 or so - must be jettisoned and rewritten to fit this new motivational censorship.
The reviews of Kingdom of Heaven are making me sad. As one reviewer said, the infallible Hollywood rule is that the stories get worse and the armies get bigger. I mean, the story is about the Third Crusade. They had Richard Coeur de Lion and Salah al-Din, and they couldn't make a story out of that. For crying out loud. |
