Kingdom of Heaven [WS] [2 Discs] [DVD] [2005]

Balien is an honorable blacksmith in a European village drawn out by circumstances to fight corrupted religious leaders as he struggles to save many peaceful people from persecution and murder during one of the 12th century crusades. Orlando Bloom leads many well cast and performed roles portraying various cultures and social classes in one of the more realistic period piece movies made. This movie could be used in classrooms to explore the clash of civilizations where so-called leaders exploit widespread ignorance through fear of authority and spread violence pretending it is sanctioned or even desired by the source of all Love. Some characters demonstrate how honorable people may honor free-will choices to be loving and honest, while other characters choose violence to deny the free-will choices of others. Some learn that there is no true love or true faith without individual free-will choice. You may enjoy the realistic depiction of daily life of the powerful versus the poor and how the poor pay the immeasurably painful price of the power greedy leaders whom they did not even get to elect. The warfare is realistic and epic in scale while the friendships and romance are thoughtful and heart touching. Much more can be written about it as this is one of the best movies made.

Decent movie. Orlando Bloom is a great actor. Nice price.

A good story, very well told. I have to mention the great cinematography, seeing that it's a blu ray movie. I'll be watching this again.

First off, Kingdom of Heaven the Directors Cut is an amazing film which you likely already know and many of you reading this have probably seen the movie many times and are wondering how this re-release fares. Many people have written great reviews regarding the content of the movie and they are much better writers than I so I am going to mainly comment on other things about the Blu-ray. For many years, the majority of the behind the scenes features and bonuses were not available on Blu-ray. They were only available on the DvD 4 disc special edition (which I own and its an amazing collectors edition). Well with this Ultimate/Anniversary Edition (my cover art says Ultimate edition rather then Anniversary), you get the original cut of the film, a roadshow version (which adds a short introduction by Ridley Scott and some intermission breaks like old school films had) and all of the previously released special features from the Director's Cut DVD and the Theatrical Cut DVDs. There is a huge amount of behind the scenes stuff regarding all aspects of the film which they made into a 2.5 hour long documentary and there is even more than that. It is very interesting if you are into that type of thing. The movie looks and sounds amazing in 1080p and 5.1 DTS-HD Master audio. The documentary and other special features are in SD quality unfortunately, though they do look a bit better here than they did on the DVD version.

I had never seen this Ridley Scott movie, but had largely heard negative things over the years. I am very glad I gave it a chance. Turned out to be very enjoyable and well worth picking up. It's a nice package with lots of extras, and the movie looks terrific. They mentioned that it was recut after its theatrical run, which may have made this version better and that explains why so many didn't like it originally. I don't know. If you like medieval sword movies, etc., you will enjoy this.