Kingdom of the Wicked on "The Kingdom of Heaven"

I love history and have a sort of love-hate relationship with historical melodramas.  The genre tends to appeal to my fascinations with origins, with change, and with the real-but-exotic.  Of course, the bare facts are rarely sufficient in themselves to achieve a dramatic effect without at least some imaginative intervention, and onscreen historical fictions are generally more faithful to Hollywood story conventions than to history as such.  And, yes, most of the audience is there to be entertained, not to participate in a conversation about how things used to be or how they got to be the way they are.  But, being me, I often find myself watching a movie like The Kingdom of Heaven with one eye on the film's success as simple storytelling, or spectacle, and another on how much it really tells you about a real place and time.  It makes for a certain amount of cognitive dissonance.

Contrary to expectation, however, I found that The Kingdom of Heaven derived some of its most effective dramatic moments from history, and was at its weakest when the writers indulged their own cliché-ridden imaginations:  ( A lot of spoilers interspersed with things we know about the actual Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem ... )

But do I recommend the movie?  Sure, if you like costume drama, exotic desert locales, swordplay, spectacular battle scenes (this is a Ridley Scott film, after all), pure imagery (I'm thinking particularly of the portrayal of Edward Norton's Baldwin in his silver mask and strange costume--I've no idea whether it was historical, but it was certainly striking), or if you're a big fan of any of the film's scenery-chewing big stars.  Just remember that if a scene looks, sounds, feels like a Hollywood cliché, that's probably all that it is ...