Opening the Kingdom.

It's not often that the release schedule of a film is as interesting as that for Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven. Next week, it's going to start rolling out across globe very, very quickly. On Wednesday, May 4, it opens in a few minor yet notable markets as far flung as Iceland and Egypt, Indonesia and Belgium. The following day sees the first of a worldwide one-two punch. A sampling: Australia and New Zealand; Argentina and Chile; Germany and Austria; Hong Kong and Singapore; and this'll be interesting: Israel. The next day, Russia, South Africa and the big payoff, the US and the UK.

In years past, such immediate saturation led to suspicion: Do the filmmakers and distributors want to draw in as many crowds as possible before word-of-mouth takes hold? Now such questions are rendered moot by the need to get the crowds in before pirated copies render all those ten-dollar tickets moot. But such a noisy opening is going to make it nearly impossible at first to gauge what'll probably be the most fascinating aspect of the film, namely, how the depiction of clashing Christian and Muslim armies in the deserts near Jerusalem is received in various parts of the world.

About half a year ago, in the pages of the New York Times, a few Islamic scholars expressed... concern. In last Sunday's NYT, Alan Riding hears Scott out: Kingdom of Heaven will not rile up even more antipathy between Christians and Muslims, argues the director. "It's actually about doing the right thing... It's about ethics. It's about going to war over passion and idealism. Idealism is great if it's balanced and humanitarian." Ah.

Peter Stanford states the case more convincingly in the Observer, going deeper as he explains how the film will take Gladiator's theme of "faith lost and reborn" to far richer places, and wider, noting that Scott hopes to appeal not only to secular humanists the world over but also to the audiences recently discovered by Mel Gibson. They may turn out to be his toughest sell: "It is in its loud and repeated plea for religious tolerance and understanding rather than its precise historical accuracy that Kingdom of Heaven risks most. Evangelical Christians went to see The Passion of the Christ because it buttressed their own faith position. They may not welcome being told that Jesus, Mohammed and Jehovah are all much of a muchness."

Scott, in the meantime, is aiming to set the parameters of the debate with a preemptive piece in the Guardian:

We set out to tell a terrific story from a dramatic age - not to make a documentary or a piece that aims to moralise or propagandise. But since our subject is the clash of these two civilisations, and we are now living in the post-9/11 world, Kingdom of Heaven will be looked at from that perspective. We did make some choices about the values expressed through the story, beginning with the central situation of two leaders trying to serve their own people and their sense of mission, while exercising a degree of tolerance of the "other".

Whether Kingdom turns out to be as brilliant as Alien or as clunky as Gladiator, talking about it is going to be a lot more engaging than whatever anyone can dream up to say about the Sith.

/dwh

Posted by cphillips at April 29, 2005 3:10 PM