In the opening minutes of Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men, justice transforms from a towering obelisk of American might into an embattled and deeply fragile conundrum. In the opening shot, the courthouse pillars leer, imposing edifices that might suggest a beatific monument to a concept solidified for eternity or, conversely, corroded into a hollow stillness. But what makes the building matter? The lawyers, who we do not see in the film, get a uniformly bad wrap, and the judge we temporarily witness seems more interested in playing with his pencil than in the conceptual, ethical, or logistical questions he doesn’t recognize are on trial (or, perhaps, he has already resigned to their assumed guilt). This seems like an evacuated justice, distorted by an unnamed McCarthyism and the daily inertia of boredom and limitation, a vaporous principle without a sturdy enough form to channel it.

12 Angry Men wants to save democracy though, or at least to argue that it is worthy of being saved, but it presents no legal armor worth a salt. This is a film in the unenviable position of mounting a battle for a principle that, it admits up front, has no army to fight for it. No formal army, that is. It is not the building, 12 Angry Men suggests, or those employed in it or by it, that form the cornerstone of American morality, but that most humble arm of democratic reasoning, the titular figures who assume they know before learning to appreciate that things might be otherwise. This, the film claims, is the soul of America, a dozen lost soldiers of democracy heretofore unknown to one another: “the people.”

Indeed, they become “the people” throughout the film. The opening tracking shot glides us through the courthouse and into the jury room, a gathering ground of difference communicated and contested, a town hall meeting in miniature. Juror #8 (Henry Fonda) marks himself as a redoubtable icon of justice by staring out the window of the room, reflection upon the wider world while preserving his own individuality, not yet fully, or only, participating in this temporary local community. When everyone sits at the table, the film christens the creation of a space of democratic give-and-take and competitive collaboration where friction produces, in theory, a truth as ragged and unfinished as it is steadfast and eternal.

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.