"If God did not love you, how could you do all the things that you have done?"This is really excellent, traditional spectacle, pretty and exciting and very self-consciously classy. Ridley never met a metaphor he wouldn't belabor or a theme he wouldn't thuddingly spell out in dialogue, but this is also so blindingly sincere in its pretentiously noble depiction of an areligious (or maybe just secular) righteousness that it transcends itself. I mean, there's literally a scene where Jeremy Irons gravely intones: "First I thought we were fighting for God, then I realized we were fighting for wealth and land. I was ashamed." Cornball earnest but simultaneously so completely forthright about its depiction of the political expediency of fanaticism and its attendant economy of wasted lives that it becomes actively moving. Orlando Bloom is just awful in it.[Extended cut]
