An epic done right

Are you NOT entertained?

That question, bellowed by Russell Crowe in 2000’s Oscar-winning Gladiator, is one that Hollywood is asking moviegoers after a series of historical epics fell on their own swords last year.

Can the warriors of yesteryear still connect with today’s popcorn crowd? That’s a question that could be answered by Kingdom of Heaven, director Ridley Scott’s drama about 12th-century knights fighting during the Crusades.

Forget damsels – when this movie rides into theaters, it could single-handedly save a genre in distress.

"The problem’s not epics, there’s a problem with people who don’t know how to do epics properly," says William Monahan, screenwriter of Kingdom of Heaven. "If you’re not filling seats at a showing of an adequately advertised motion picture, the audience hasn’t failed you; you’ve failed the audience."

If Kingdom of Heaven performs strongly, studio interest in epics would be reinvigorated by Scott, who started its most recent renaissance five years ago by directing Gladiator to a Best Picture Oscar and $188-M in tickets sold.

Scott’s latest tale of swordsmanship and honor stars Orlando Bloom as a Christian knight who rises from the lower classes and finds himself torn between the safety of a royal lover, played by Eva Green, and almost certain death waging war in the Holy Lands.

The director says he hopes his film restores a sense of romance missing from recent epics.

"Audiences are less intrigued, honestly, by battle," Scott says. "They’re more intrigued by human relations. If you’re making a film about the trappings of the period, and you’re forgetting that human relationships are the most engaging part of the storytelling process, then you’re in trouble."

Scott says the reason Gladiator connected with men and women was the Russell Crowe character’s journey to reunite with his slain wife and son in the afterlife.

Now Scott is trying to use the personal touch to conquer the box office again with Kingdom of Heaven. Scott agrees that the key to his success with such a wide-ranging story is keeping that sense of intimacy, this time embodied by the star-crossed lovers played by Bloom and Green.

Green’s character, Princess Sybilla, "is of another level, another class," says Scott. "He’s offered the world and everything else and feels he has to turn (her) away. It’s a hard relationship for him because she comes from the direction of her own Christianity, and he’s a man who is still in question of his faith."

20th Century Fox, which also has a lot of money riding on Kingdom, sees the romantic subplot as a major selling point to women and couples, who may be less attracted to the elements of politics, religion and war. "People didn’t see (1965’s) Doctor Zhivago because it was about the Russian revolution. They saw it because it was about characters they related to, and they wanted them to be together and wanted them to survive," says Jim Gianopulos, co-chairman of Fox Filmed Entertainment.

A heartthrob such as Bloom and notions of romantic sacrifice were some of Kingdom of Heaven’s biggest selling points when it came time to greenlight the movie, Gianopulos says. "There’s a great central character, a man who starts life as a blacksmith, becomes a lord and a knight, has a romance with the queen. He starts out to find redemption for sins and begin a new life and ends up fighting a much bigger cause – and there’s a beautiful love story in the middle of it."

Along with the lovers, the movie also features a silver-masked leper king, a charismatic Muslim revolutionary and a gory war over control of Jerusalem fueled by the centuries-old clash between religious and political fanaticism.

Although conventional wisdom says male moviegoers just want action and fight sequences, Gia-nopulos insists the testosterone crowd hardly withdraws from the passionate sequences. "Obviously, certain aspects appeal more to men, and vice versa, but Eva Green isn’t hard to look at," he says.