Kingdom of political correctness and very frightening masks

Mel Gibson has shown us quite astutely that if you want to make money on a movie, you should make it so it pushes religious buttons – specifically those of the evangelical Christians. This rugged bunch turned out in droves and even bought up entire theatres for The Passion (sad to say my own seemingly liberal church where I grew up in the Bay Area was among them) so that people could understand the truth of the Bible…as told by Gibson of course who was apparently present at the time. So Ridley Scott should definitely be at the forefront to receive this year’s box-office billions with his epic Kingdom of Heaven where he deals with the touchy subject of the Crusades.

Jerusalem has been a hotbed of activity since the dawn of time. Everyone has some kind of holy claim on the city, even though no one now was alive to actually take part in any ritual there that involved the intact locations and buildings that they have fought so hard to control. Currently this tiny, walled city is split into four parts so everyone can claim their own holy buildings. Why is it that throughout history everyone seemed to build on the same piece of barren land? Could it possibly stem from the fact that Judaism and Islam came from virtually the same roots, and Christianity is built from a bunch of Jews who decided to follow one outspoken individual and change their name? Given that there is still fighting in this hallowed place and that we live in an age where Keifer Sutherland appears on PSA’s during “24” to assure the country that not all Muslim-Americans are running sleeper cells, clearly it can’t be that hard to piss some people off.

But it would appear that 20th Century Fox and Ridley Scott sacrificed their cash cow in hopes of winning public favor as Owen Gleiberman puts it in Entertainment Weekly: “Scott is so busy balancing our sympathies, making sure no one gets offended, that he has made a pageant of war that would have gotten a thumbs-up from Eleanor Roosevelt.” It would appear we’re going to miss out on the juicy in-fighting that ensues from a controversial movie because this one is so sugar coated that no one really knows who to be pissed at. But at least some people tried and here's the best we've got.

One camp says the movie is too anti-Muslim. The main conflict is the Christians trying to maintain hold on their holy sites within Jerusalem while fighting off the hordes of Muslims who are trying to get it back (even though everyone in that army was born well after the city fell into Christian control). Khaled Abu el-Fadl, a professor of Islamic law at UCLA, says in the Washington Times, “"I believe this movie teaches people to hate Muslims. There is a stereotype of the Muslim as constantly stupid, retarded, backward, unable to think in complex forms. It's really annoying at an intellectual level, and it really misrepresents history on many levels." If Orlando Bloom is fighting against an army, they must be heathens, right? So there you go folks, that's the best we get from the mouths of the academic dissenters – we think Muslims are “retarded.”

Then on the other hand there are a number of people who say that the movie is too PRO-Muslim. Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith, Britain’s leading authority on the Crusades (you have to wonder where his biases lie), told the London Telegraph that “[The film] is Osama bin Laden’s version of history. It will fuel the Islamic fundamentalists.” This is an awfully bold statement. At best it could be because the Muslims are often depicted as the gentle people just trying to live peacefully while the upstart Christians go out of their way to make war, or because the parallels between the leader of the Christians and George Bush make it all the more disturbing when he is tied to the back of a donkey in his underwear and paraded in front of the Muslim army. But either way, these two viewpoints only provide that we either think Muslims are intellectually inferior or that this film tells us the terrorists have won. There is no discussion about the Christian involvement nor about the long-term effects of this pointless war.

Then of course there is this man who presents a third point of contention into the mix, saying that the movie was a complete infringement upon the first 100 pages of his book. Unless he happened to write the Bible, we will not be able to expect any good discussion to come from him - though his very specific claim causes one to wonder what was on the remaining pages. Perhaps we shall be seeing a trilogy of Kingdom of Heaven, the third installment of which Orlando Bloom will be struck down, turned into a machine, and become more powerful than we can ever imagine.

Frankly, I’m disappointed that there is such a disjointed conversation about this film. There are a lot of issues that need to be discussed regarding religion in today's world and Ridley Scott had the resources in his hands to make that happen. Not a single religion that was involved in the Crusades should feel good about what happened, even though Mr. Scott wants us to leave the theatre feeling like everything was completely fine. The majority of the world’s international conflicts have centered around this one piece of dirt in the eastern desert, so clearly Orlando Bloom didn’t solve everything as well as they would like us to believe. But instead they chose to glaze over this dark period in history and now they have to live with a measly $20 million opening weekend.

But I think we can all agree on one thing: Edward Norton looks incredibly creepy in a silver leper mask.