"Kingdom of Heaven:"

Ridley Scott's Crusader follow-up to "Gladiator" isn't terribly exciting, but it's more interesting than most movies this year.

Unsurprisingly, little Orlando Bloom (the blond elf Legolas in "Lord of the Rings") has a hard time comparing to "Gladiator's" Russell Crowe as a sword-swinging hero. And it doesn't help that the opening scene introduces 6'-4" Liam Neeson as Bloom's long-lost father, the Baron of Ibelin, come back to France to invite his illegitimate blacksmith son to accompany him to his castle in the Holy Land. The Hollywood tradition is to surround little stars with little supporting actors, not with magnificent brutes like Neeson. Still, it's fun to think about it from the illegitimate kid's point of view: I'm mad at my father for abandoning my mother, but, on the other hand, after all these years, I've finally realized: holy cow, my dad could beat up your dad!

A lot of men hate Bloom for being a teenybopper idol, a "practice boyfriend" for millions of girls. As far as I can tell, there are more pictures of Bloom on the Internet than anybody other than Britney Spears and George W. Bush. As I've mentioned before, however, this is a dead-end career path, since girls move on quickly to new boys-of-the-moment. To enjoy enduring careers, stars have to appeal primarily to their own sexes. Bloom, looking scruffy and dark in "Kingdom of Heaven," is trying hard to get past his teeny-bopper past, and I wish him well, although he's not there yet.

Although the backstory for Bloom's character Balian of Ibelin is completely fictitious, the film is surprisingly true to the main events of the 1180s. There really was a Balian of Ibelin who led the defense of Jerusalem against Saladin, the leader of the Muslim Saracens, and most of the other characters are fairly accurate historically. Dramatically, however, that's a problem, since Balian's decision -- to put up enough of a fight to justify negotiating an honorable surrender of Jerusalem in exchange for Saladin, whose promises remain famous for their trustworthiness, granting safe passage to the sea -- while reasonable, is not hugely inspiring. Obviously, the filmmakers feel that all this obsessing over Jerusalem for thousands of years is stupid, but reasonableness is not a terribly satisfying emotional payoff for an epic film.

Why does Jerusalem take up so much space in our brains? Medieval Europeans drew it as the center of the Earth. Oddly enough, it really is just about at the crossroads of the three continents of the Old World.

Enlightenment era figures denounced the Crusades as the height of irrationality -- to think that the Holy Land could be recovered after 450 years seemed nuts to them -- but the success of Zionism in recovering the Holy Land after 1800 years has put the Crusades in a new perspective.

Besides, there were pressing strategic issues inspiring the Crusades. The conversion of the ferocious Central Asian Turkish horse warriors to Islam had re-invigorated Muslim fanaticism and military power. The Seljuk Turks seized Jerusalem from the tolerant, pilgrim-hosting Egyptians and in 1071 inflicted a catastrophic defeat on the Orthodox Catholic Byzantine Empire at Manzikert. The Byzantines had blocked Muslim depradations by land on Western Europe for centuries (although Muslim pirates were a constant annoyance, kidnapping something like a million Europeans into slavery and raiding all over coastal Europe, even sacking, at a later date, Iceland), so the Western Europeans resolved that the best defense to the weakening of the Eastern Christians was a strong offense against the Muslims.

The First Crusade (begun in 1095) remains a marvel of long-distance force projection. In the long run, though, Palestine proved a less attractive place to live than France, so the Crusaders never had the masses of settlers necessary to make a permanent go of it in the Middle East, and the last Crusader castle fell in 1291, almost 200 years after the First Crusade.

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Coming up in The American Conservative: my review of "Crash." Don't believe all the reviews about how it discredits racial stereotypes, yada yada. It's a lot more interesting than than. It's too bad Oscar voters are so biased toward late-in-the-year movies because Matt Dillon's performance is a marvel.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer