Lights, camera, actionįilm can only go so far towards creating an absolutely accurate portrayal of the past. So who was right? On the one hand, the professional historians – or the critics and the public? Which rather boils down to the question of whether filmmakers should be educating their audience, or entertaining them. The New York Times critic Manohla Dargis described the film as “an ostensibly fair-minded, even-handed account of one of the least fair-minded, even-handed chapters in human history”. Whatever the historians may have thought, the film won critical praise – Rolling Stone declared that “Scott delivers rousing entertainment” – and took more than US$211m at the box office. Even while the film was still in production, Cambridge historian Jonathan Riley-Smith called it “nonsense” and “Osama bin Laden’s version of history”, while Michael Haag wrote that “Scott revises history wholesale, or rather makes it up.” He concludes his review by stating that “there is nothing that bears much relation to historical fact”. The footsteps echoing inside, the reminder of the chill always felt inside those large stone structures like that, to the architecture, the stonework and the size.Ridley Scott’s epic 2005 movie Kingdom of Heaven, about the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin in 1187, has been widely criticised by historians for its lack of accuracy. I have visited many churches and cathedrals in my time in France and England from a tourist perspective, and the feeling I received from the film was the same as the memory I have from visiting those places. Whether the costume or customs of the day are that closely reproduced is hard to say, but they did use real buildings from long ago, and most certainly the church part of the film was set in was real. In terms of set and location, it looked and felt real.

As it stands, it is close to two hours in length. Perhaps adding more fact would have slowed the film down and made it unnecessarily long, in my opinion a film should last not much longer than 2 hours, it is a good length and unless absolutely necessary or spectacular, shouldn’t go on for much longer. It does take many liberties and ignores a lot of historical fact, but the basic message and essence of the history is there. In my opinion, the film blends the history with entertainment well.

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