It is embarrassing how much better Kingdom of Heaven is than the trivial, banal Gladiator, the film that did more than anything to kickstart the historic epic cinema trend at the turn of the 21^st century and ensure director Ridley Scott financial solvency for eternity. I would only be being kind of hurtful if I were to say that this is the only one of Scott’s 21^st century efforts that remembers that films think, rather than only represent things, visually. Scott works with real images in Kingdom of Heaven, visions that reward patient viewing, that express ideas that aren’t always fully worked out in a screenplay, that demand an attentiveness to conflict and polyphony on the screen, reminders of tension and multiplicity in real life.  The man’s historical epics haven’t all been worthless. The Last Duel is at times amusingly rambunctious, raffishly brutal in its deconstruction of male idioms of medieval prowess. Napoleon is an ironist’s camp taxidermy exhibit of dead history, a complete evacuation of heroic power played as impudent impotence. But these are also misshapen things, and the kernels of value in them are often more intermittent amusements than the full-throated, painterly attention Kingdom of Heaven brings to a world that hasn’t changed as much as we’d hope. “Historical epics transmuting past idioms into timely political themes” is close to the least interesting film genre in the world to me, but I admired the combination of Old Hollywood earnestness and austere modern chilliness here, the David Lean-esque belief in the hope that well-observed compositions by observant and curious people can aspire to world historical importance and that, if they do fail, even because of their failures, they might mean something to the world.

I also admire how thoroughly this film manages to be both inspiring and deflating, often at the same time. This is a Hollywood blockbuster in which the final battle is a futile, grueling war of attrition, a vicious and unholy slog in which humans are physically saved, but not necessarily spiritually absolved, by an act of humility rather than might. Kingdom of Heaven is also a Hollywood blockbuster with an awareness of political economy, a genuine appreciation for the limits, but also the necessity, of human agency within impossibly wide systems of control and imperial conflict. There’s a fantastic sense of humans making their own future in a world not under conditions of their choosing, finding their way through a murk of conflict and confronting the forces of history that thrum far beyond their capacity to grasp them. Kingdom of Heaven manages to mark the characters as circumstantial antagonists in a tragic world, saved from mutual destruction by an act of strength through compromise and negotiation.