![]() ![]() ![]() Lights, camera, actionįilm can only go so far towards creating an absolutely accurate portrayal of the past. So who was right? On the one hand, the professional historians – or the critics and the public? Which rather boils down to the question of whether filmmakers should be educating their audience, or entertaining them. The New York Times critic Manohla Dargis described the film as “an ostensibly fair-minded, even-handed account of one of the least fair-minded, even-handed chapters in human history”. ![]() Whatever the historians may have thought, the film won critical praise – Rolling Stone declared that “Scott delivers rousing entertainment” – and took more than US$211m at the box office. Even while the film was still in production, Cambridge historian Jonathan Riley-Smith called it “nonsense” and “Osama bin Laden’s version of history”, while Michael Haag wrote that “Scott revises history wholesale, or rather makes it up.” He concludes his review by stating that “there is nothing that bears much relation to historical fact”. Ridley Scott’s epic 2005 movie Kingdom of Heaven, about the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin in 1187, has been widely criticised by historians for its lack of accuracy. ![]()
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