**1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Orlando Bloom, Eva Green, Jeremy Irons, David Thewlis, Ghassan Massoud, Brendan Gleeson, Martin Csokas, Edward Norton, and Liam Neeson
Directed by Ridley Scott & written by William Monahan
2005
145 min R
An overview of the modern—or “glossy”—Hollywood historical epic begins ten years ago with a film called “Braveheart,” directed by and starring Mel Gibson. Classical historical epics, like “The Ten Commandments” or “Ben-Hur,” are of course glorified soap operas. With “Braveheart” the epic becomes a glorified action movie. Women exist primarily to be killed so that the hero has a motivation for slaughtering thousands of his enemies in gigantic, exquisitely-choreographed battle sequences. To quote “The Simpsons’” McBain: “this is the part in my movies where I would go berserk.” As for the villains, they have English accents and about as much depth and complexity as the heavies in another of Mel Gibson’s magnum opus, “Lethal Weapon 2,” although they aren’t as much fun.
To be fair, Gibson’s “Braveheart”—with its classic compositions and non-computer effects—is probably more of a proto-modern epic. With Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator,” all the elements of the genre fall into place. Everything is computerized: shimmering, glossy, colorful, and fake, but fake in a way that was, at first, unfamiliar. The wife (and child) is once again killed. Slaughter and hilarity ensue, as our hero cuts his way through vast amounts of villains who are, at best, treated as semi-human bags of blood. Editing is frenetic, cameras are too shaky to really understand battle sequences, frame rates change at the drop of a hat, and everything is loud, loud, loud. Accents are all over the place, with Joaquim Phoenix speaking in a vaguely ancient, mid-Atlantic Shakespearean something-or-other. The movie’s tone, especially for what is essentially a B movie revenge picture with a huge price tag, is very, very somber. Oh yes, and we change historical period from “Braveheart,” but that doesn’t really matter.
Roland Emmerich’s “The Patriot” brings Gibson back, kills off his son, and pits him for three hours against the same snooty subhuman Englishmen he fought in “Braveheart.” Huge armies gather, women say little, the tone is serious and patriotic. Gibson’s early pacifism is pushed aside when he learns to kill again. The “Lord of the Rings” trilogy from Peter Jackson goes a step farther by making the “enemies” literally non-human, which makes killing as many droves—and droves and droves and yawn droves—of them as guilt-free as eating steak fries. Huger armies gather, women say less, Christopher Lee British-ly intones threats, and the tone is as carefree as a funeral. Rulers not eager for war come across as lily-livered women.
Wolfgang Petersen’s “Troy” puts the men in skirts, kidnaps the wife instead of killing her, and assumes an interesting, if shallow, anti-war flavor. The hugest armies gather, Shakespearean actors chew vile edicts and ultimata, and women speak only when quoting “Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.” Then comes Oliver Stone’s “Alexander,” the enigma of the bunch, partly for being a gloriously incoherent mess, partly for emphasizing how un-ambitious all the epics since “Braveheart” have been, but mostly because it’s a throwback to the campy, soap opera days of yore. Huge armies gather, but mostly to go to the bathhouse together.
These eight movies have garnered between 40 and 50 Oscar nominations, including 3 wins for Best Picture, 2 wins for Best Director, and probably 15 to 20 other victories. I would be lying if I said I didn’t, for the most part, enjoy them. They are, by and large, “wow” movie experiences, 2-3 hours lost in far-off make-believe lands of color, pomp, costumes, flowing drapes, clinking stirrups, whooshing swords, splattering blood, and processions of horses, elephants, and dromedaries. Because they have more in common with “Face/Off” than with a real epic—honestly, “Gladiator” doesn’t deserve to appear in the same sentence as “Lawrence of Arabia,” “The Seven Samurai,” or even “Gangs of New York”—they have sturdy plots kept moving by sharp, shallow characters colliding at sword and/or gunpoint at regular intervals. I enjoy seeing all the tools of the Hollywood arsenal rolled out: the stunts, the costumes, the effects, the wide vistas. Scott, Emmerich, Jackson, and Petersen, while not what you’d call “poets of cinema,” are slick professionals who know how to show us enormous quantities of people, ships, and animals moving through expansive landscapes, both real and virtual.
Another attribute of the glossy computer epic is that there is a constant emphasis on how “then” is different than “now.” The differences in laws, customs, and values are highlighted obviously and even judgmentally. Characters are offended by things that offend us but probably wouldn’t offend them. It’s as if the filmmakers are terrified of confusing us or, worse, fear we’ll think they’re approving of the way things used to be just by showing them to us. The result is that we never feel like we’re in the past. Compare this to “The Seventh Seal,” “Andrei Roublev,” or even “Master & Commander,” where you feel as if you’ve been dropped into another world with alien values and are seldom given any hints or helping hands to figure out what’s going on. (“Braveheart” is less guilty of this than all its successors.)
These films are, for the most part, good, stupid fun, guilty pleasures, and the only real strike against them is their auras of self-importance. If you’re not careful, you’ll leave them thinking you’ve seen something important when, except for “Braveheart” and maaaaybe “Alexander,” you haven’t really seen anything at all. Truly, ours is a love-hate relationship: I stay up nights thinking of mean-funny ways I can incorporate diatribes against “Lord of the Rings” into the most random, unexpected places, but I’m always looking forward to the next overwrought opportunity to buckle swash.
So Ridley Scott’s “Kingdom of Heaven,” the newest addition to the modern epic genre, surprised me by being the only thing I didn’t expect it to be: kind of boring. I thought for sure that “Kingdom of Heaven” would have as much to do with the real crusades as “Gladiator” has to do with Rome: an exotic locale to provide all the costumes, cliffs, and castles where our heroes can run one another through while getting magnificently dirty.
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