Watched this two weeks ago, and listend to it again yesterday while staining the study ladder. Good movie, I thought. Good visuals, solid acting, and a good story - I remembered the evacuation of Jerusalem from my recent Byzantine readings, so I guessed the ending before it happened. I watched the extras last night and they kept referring to the story as being mostly true, so I got curious and read the relevant chapter of Runciman's History of the Crusades (you have to love having a library where you have that book - in a three volume Folio edition, no less - available to check a few facts now and then.) Sure enough, the first paragraph of the chapter laid out the basic story with all the characters - the leper king of Jerusalem, Baldwin, his sister and her husband from hell, and the war-mongering nobleman, and the the crucial Battle of Hattin that led to the reconquest of Jerusalem by the Saracen leader Saladin (who, according to both the book and history was pretty much the epitome of an honorable king, in sharp contrast to the Christian crusaders he faced). The surprise was that Orlando Bloom's character, Balian of Ibelin was there as well, and most of what he did in the movie he really did, including the role he played at the siege of Jerusalem. Now what they left out was that he wasn't a nobleman's illegitimate son who steps into the role of leader - he was a mature man with a family and the only reason he was at Jerusalem was that he had a pass from Saladin to get his wife and children out. Problem was that the people needed a leader and wouldn't let him leave, so he had to ask Saladin basically to default on the pass and resume warfare again him. Always a class act, Saladin not only agreed - he gave Balian's family an escort out of the city to safety, and reportedly wept to see the end of such a noble line when they passed through his camp. Of course this is the same guy that, when he discovered that a young noble's wedding feast was going on in a castle he was besieging, gave orders not to bombard the tower in which the newly married couple was staying.
All in all, a good movie, and a very interesting visualization of the Crusades. My one complaint was that it did seem that they were ratcheting things up a bit for the sake of appearances - perhaps to avoid looking shabby by comparison to The Lord of the Rings. I don't think Jerusalem was quite that built up (it looked suspiciously like Babylon in Alexander), and I'm pretty sure that Calvary was never at the top of a prominent hill - in fact by 1183 or so it has been cut down to an outcrop of rock within a church for about 800 years. Thus while I liked the all-night vigil Balian makes on it when he arrives in Jerusalem before burying his wife's cross on it, it wasn't quite historically correct. But the budget probably didn't include a set for the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, and it would have been confusing and hardly romantic for him to make a vigil in the chapel in the church.
But I did enjoy the movie, and was pleasantly surprised at how well it told the true story. I also liked the characters' discovery of the value of having a truce in a place like Jerusalem, where all faiths had the ability to go to their places of worship, their respect for one another, and their struggle against fanatics who wanted war. The Templars' "God wills it!" cry in favor of war and shouts of "Blasphemy!" when told that the crusaders would likely lose such a war were painfully familiar.