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Kingdom of Heaven; ... Crusaders will be immortalized!
Topic Started: Mar 12 2005, 07:23 PM (404 Views)
Brego
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Council Elders
Plot Outline:

"Kingdom of Heaven" is an epic adventure during the Crusades of the 12th Century about a common man Balian of Ibelin (Bloom), a young blacksmith in Jerusalem who finds himself thrust into a decades-long war. A stranger in a foreign land, he serves a doomed king, falls in love with an exotic and forbidden queen, and rises to knighthood. Ultimately, he must protect the people of Jerusalem from overwhelming forces... while striving to keep a fragile peace.

Directed by:
Ridley Scott

Writing credits:
William Monahan

Starring: Orlando Bloom, Eva Green, Jeremy Irons, David Thewlis, Brendan Gleeson, Marton Csokas, Liam Neeson, Edward Norton

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Soy Kapitan
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Yo Soy Ya Si!!
orlando bloom nanaman.... marami nanaman manonood na mga chicks ni2 /gg
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Lady Eowyn
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Hey, it`s a Ridley Scott film.. expect this would be a great movie.. :smash:
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Brego
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just wanna share the history of the crusades /no1



The Crusades:

Series of wars by Western European Christians to recapture the Holy Land from the Muslims. The Crusades were first undertaken in 1096 and ended in the late 13th century. The term Crusade was originally applied solely to European efforts to retake from the Muslims the city of Jerusalem, which was sacred to Christians as the site of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. It was later used to designate any military effort by Europeans against non-Christians.

The Crusaders carved out feudal states in the Near East. Thus the Crusades are an important early part of the story of European expansion and colonialism. They mark the first time Western Christendom undertook a military initiative far from home, the first time significant numbers left to carry their culture and religion abroad.

In addition to the campaigns in the East, the Crusading movement includes other wars against Muslims, pagans, and dissident Christians and the general expansion of Christian Europe. In a broad sense the Crusades were an expression of militant Christianity and European expansion. They combined religious interests with secular and military enterprises. Christians learned to live in different cultures, which they learned and absorbed; they also imposed something of their own characteristics on these cultures. The Crusades strongly affected the imagination and aspirations of people at the time, and to this day they are among the most famous chapters of medieval history.

Military Religious Orders:

1. Poor Knights of Christ, also known as the Knights Templar or the Templars
- The Knights’ administration was highly centralized. The order’s leader was called the grand master, and he presided over three ranks of members: knights, chaplains, and sergeants. Only the highest rank, the knight, was permitted to wear the order’s distinctive clothing, a white tunic with a red Latin Cross on the back. The grand master was responsible only to the pope, and the many Templar installations in Palestine and Europe were also free from the control of kings and bishops.

The first duties of the order included providing military escorts to religious pilgrims making the journey from the Mediterranean to Jerusalem. However, as the Templars’ popularity increased in the 12th century, they developed into a formidable band of knights. Numbering around 20,000 at their peak, the Templars established fortresses in many cities in Palestine and came to be very important in defending the Crusader states, especially the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, from attacks by Muslim forces.


2. Knights of Saint John of Jerusalem, or Hospitalers
-Members of the military religious order of the Knights of Saint John of Jerusalem are most often referred to as Hospitalers. The Hospitalers were the oldest institution among the three great military orders of the Roman Church in Palestine, although they originally performed charitable rather than military functions. They were established before the First Crusade (1095-1099). In the 11th century the French nobleman Gerard founded an order to care for sick pilgrims near the Church of Saint John the Baptist in Jerusalem. In 1113 Pope Paschal II officially recognized the order, which limited membership to men of noble birth.

Members of the order wore a black cloak with an eight-pointed Maltese cross on it, and the order’s organization was similar to that of the Templars. The Hospitalers had a grand master who presided over a centralized organization of knights, chaplains, and servants.The Hospitalers followed the popular monastic Rule of Saint Augustine, named for the Roman bishop, Augustine of Hippo, who had inspired many of its practices. These regulations, like those that Bernard of Clairvaux wrote for the Templars, governed the order’s daily rituals of prayer, study, and work. The Rule of Saint Augustine was frequently adopted by monks in the 12th century.


3. Teutonic Knights of Saint Mary’s Hospital at Jerusalem, called simply Teutonic Knights
- The Teutonic Knights were the last of the three great military religious orders to be founded during the Crusades. The order was founded at Acre in Palestine in 1190. In that year the Muslims mounted a siege of the city, and the new order of Teutonic Knights was given a hospital to care for sick and wounded Crusaders. In 1198 the Teutonic Knights were changed from a purely charitable order to a military one to help fight the Turks in the Holy Land. Membership in the Teutonic Knights was limited to German noblemen. In all other respects, though, the order was similar to the Hospitalers and Templars. The Teutonic Knights used the same monastic rule as the Templars, and their organization was much the same as the Templars and Hospitalers. They received official recognition from Pope Innocent III in 1199 and were granted the use of a white tunic with a black cross.

...

The military religious orders accepted their work as the supreme expression of the principles of Christian knighthood. By combining martial ideals with religious zeal, the orders helped establish the concept of the knight as an honorable and pious Christian soldier. This practice helped infuse chivalry, the code of medieval knights, with religious overtones, and led to the image of the noble knight as a man of both faith and honor.
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grass*
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Brego
Apr 24 2005, 12:09 AM
just wanna share the history of the crusades /no1



The Crusades:

Series of wars by Western European Christians to recapture the Holy Land from the Muslims. The Crusades were first undertaken in 1096 and ended in the late 13th century. The term Crusade was originally applied solely to European efforts to retake from the Muslims the city of Jerusalem, which was sacred to Christians as the site of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. It was later used to designate any military effort by Europeans against non-Christians.

The Crusaders carved out feudal states in the Near East. Thus the Crusades are an important early part of the story of European expansion and colonialism. They mark the first time Western Christendom undertook a military initiative far from home, the first time significant numbers left to carry their culture and religion abroad.

In addition to the campaigns in the East, the Crusading movement includes other wars against Muslims, pagans, and dissident Christians and the general expansion of Christian Europe. In a broad sense the Crusades were an expression of militant Christianity and European expansion. They combined religious interests with secular and military enterprises. Christians learned to live in different cultures, which they learned and absorbed; they also imposed something of their own characteristics on these cultures. The Crusades strongly affected the imagination and aspirations of people at the time, and to this day they are among the most famous chapters of medieval history.

Military Religious Orders:

1. Poor Knights of Christ, also known as the Knights Templar or the Templars
- The Knights’ administration was highly centralized. The order’s leader was called the grand master, and he presided over three ranks of members: knights, chaplains, and sergeants. Only the highest rank, the knight, was permitted to wear the order’s distinctive clothing, a white tunic with a red Latin Cross on the back. The grand master was responsible only to the pope, and the many Templar installations in Palestine and Europe were also free from the control of kings and bishops.

The first duties of the order included providing military escorts to religious pilgrims making the journey from the Mediterranean to Jerusalem. However, as the Templars’ popularity increased in the 12th century, they developed into a formidable band of knights. Numbering around 20,000 at their peak, the Templars established fortresses in many cities in Palestine and came to be very important in defending the Crusader states, especially the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, from attacks by Muslim forces.


2. Knights of Saint John of Jerusalem, or Hospitalers
-Members of the military religious order of the Knights of Saint John of Jerusalem are most often referred to as Hospitalers. The Hospitalers were the oldest institution among the three great military orders of the Roman Church in Palestine, although they originally performed charitable rather than military functions. They were established before the First Crusade (1095-1099). In the 11th century the French nobleman Gerard founded an order to care for sick pilgrims near the Church of Saint John the Baptist in Jerusalem. In 1113 Pope Paschal II officially recognized the order, which limited membership to men of noble birth.

Members of the order wore a black cloak with an eight-pointed Maltese cross on it, and the order’s organization was similar to that of the Templars. The Hospitalers had a grand master who presided over a centralized organization of knights, chaplains, and servants.The Hospitalers followed the popular monastic Rule of Saint Augustine, named for the Roman bishop, Augustine of Hippo, who had inspired many of its practices. These regulations, like those that Bernard of Clairvaux wrote for the Templars, governed the order’s daily rituals of prayer, study, and work. The Rule of Saint Augustine was frequently adopted by monks in the 12th century.


3. Teutonic Knights of Saint Mary’s Hospital at Jerusalem, called simply Teutonic Knights
- The Teutonic Knights were the last of the three great military religious orders to be founded during the Crusades. The order was founded at Acre in Palestine in 1190. In that year the Muslims mounted a siege of the city, and the new order of Teutonic Knights was given a hospital to care for sick and wounded Crusaders. In 1198 the Teutonic Knights were changed from a purely charitable order to a military one to help fight the Turks in the Holy Land. Membership in the Teutonic Knights was limited to German noblemen. In all other respects, though, the order was similar to the Hospitalers and Templars. The Teutonic Knights used the same monastic rule as the Templars, and their organization was much the same as the Templars and Hospitalers. They received official recognition from Pope Innocent III in 1199 and were granted the use of a white tunic with a black cross.

...

The military religious orders accepted their work as the supreme expression of the principles of Christian knighthood. By combining martial ideals with religious zeal, the orders helped establish the concept of the knight as an honorable and pious Christian soldier. This practice helped infuse chivalry, the code of medieval knights, with religious overtones, and led to the image of the noble knight as a man of both faith and honor.

hehe reading this makes me feel like meron strategy game bout it. heheeh OT OT i know...but nevertheless...
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kwisatz haderach
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ah.. the crusades... one of the most defining moments in christianity

nothing beats spreading god's word by slaying all who do not believe... <_<
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Brego
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Council Elders
Effects of the Crusades

- Fatal weakening of Byzantine Empire
- Vast increase in cultural horizons for many Europeans.
- Stimulated Mediterranean trade.
- Need to transfer large sums of money for troops and supplies led to development of banking techniques.
- Rise of heraldic emblems and coats of arms.
- Knowledge introduced to Europe
- Heavy stone masonry, construction of castles and stone churches.
Siege technology, tunneling, sapping.
- Moslem minarets adopted as church spires
- Weakening of nobility, rise of merchant classes
- Romantic and imaginative literature.


yeah the Crusade is not a perfect war (or any other major wars) and it did failed, but it did contribute to the history of the world...

as for my interest on this, yeah you could say I got my interest from a certain game called Age of Empires 2 and I'm not ashamed of it! and I also got my interest by reading books about Knights, Princesses and Dragons when I was a little kid...
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Gharbad..the..weak
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Movie Review po...just wanna share it :D

Mejo mahaba po...kaya patience na lang :P

Near the end of ''Kingdom of Heaven,'' a plaintive period epic from Ridley Scott about the bloody orgies of piety known as the Crusades, the camera pulls back from the tumult of battle. Perched on high, as if assuming the view of a passing bird or some divine being, the camera looks down on a medieval scene that condenses the barbarism that has consumed the previous two hours of screen time -- the impaled flesh, the crushed bone, the hollow and inflamed invocations of faith. From this great height, the Christian crusaders and Muslim warriors below no longer look like men, like warring armies of God, but bacteria under a microscope.


Outside of a couple of sneering papal emissaries, this high-flown image of men at war comes about as close to real commentary on the Crusades as Mr. Scott gets in his curiously disengaged film about the Christian incursion into the Holy Land. Written by a newcomer, William Monahan, ''Kingdom of Heaven'' is an ostensibly fair-minded, even-handed account of one of the least fair-minded, even-handed chapters in human history, during which European Christians descended on the Middle East for more than 200 years. Given the presumed lofty price tag of the film, its global reach and the current state of world affairs, with warriors of different faiths and ideologies battling one another in the name of God and terrorism, this vision of the Crusades is not that surprising. Paint a majority religion with too damning a brush and you just may lose out on a nice chunk of the international movie market.


The historian Robert Wolff has called the Crusades a ''long chronicle of greed, stupidity, treachery, duplicity and incompetence.'' Mr. Scott begins his chronicle in France, sometime before the Third Crusade, circa the late 12th century, with a grieving blacksmith, Balian, played by the young English actor Orlando Bloom, reuniting with a father he never knew, Godfrey of Ibelin (Liam Neeson). En route to Jerusalem, where he has long done his part for the holy war, Godfrey pauses to give his son both legitimacy and a title. Initially reluctant, Balian acquiesces partly because his wife's recent death has left him unmoored, partly because the law is hot on his heels, a story element that gives Mr. Scott license to very quickly -- to borrow a memorable phrase from the director's last epic endeavor, ''Gladiator'' -- ''unleash hell.''


Mr. Scott is a virtuoso of movie violence and he does not disappoint on that count here. ''Kingdom of Heaven'' is filled with scene after scene of choreographed mayhem. Soon after Balian and Godfrey join forces, accompanied by crusaders whose numbers include a sword-swinging, rough-riding monk (a characteristically fine David Thewlis), they are beset by soldiers intent on bringing the blacksmith to justice. (Earlier, Balian both crosses the law and proves his crusader mettle by tossing a man in an open fire.) Amid a storm of very fast cuts and whiplash camera moves, sprays of blood and flying dirt, men meet one another without mercy. One crusader tugs at an arrow buried deep in his torso while another kneels, stunned in the dirt, gurgling blood with an arrow speared straight through his neck.


After starting with a bang, Mr. Scott tries to keep us in his storytelling grip with many more visceral, frenetically violent scenes. Soon after they meet, Balian and Godfrey part ways and the son ends up sailing for the Middle East without his father. What follows is a shipwreck and a desert fight to the death (there are neither safe landings nor safe harbors in this part of the world), followed by a lull during which Balian grapples with a crisis in faith. The death of his wife has made Balian question his belief in God, a crisis that serves the character but robs the story of both narrative thrust and purpose, since it means that ''Kingdom of Heaven'' is effectively a Crusades movie without a convincing crusader.


Both believers and nonbelievers joined the Crusades, driven into the Middle East from Europe by a variety of spiritual and political rationales. (One historian has called crusading ''an act of love.'') Whether the Crusades were offensive or defensive campaigns remains a matter of predictable dispute, though a dispute that seems -- at least from this angle -- beside the point given the ghastly death toll. Whatever the case, Mr. Scott carefully stacks his films with the righteous and the tolerant, keeping the real villains far and few between. In this context, Balian initially comes across as a kind of ecumenical Hamlet, pondering not death but belief, and then, when forced to protect Jerusalem against Muslim troops, a proto Henry V who rallies the faithful with yet another iteration of the St. Crispin Day's speech.


Mr. Bloom delivers this unpersuasive speech amid a climactic battle during which the Muslim leader, Saladin, tries to wrest Jerusalem from Christian control. As played by the Syrian film actor Ghassan Massoud, Saladin looks as cool as a long drink of water. (That may explain online rumors that some Christians are up in metaphoric arms about the film, though this Crusade couldn't be better timed if it had been dreamed up by studio publicists.) With his creased cheeks and wind-snapped black robes, Mr. Massoud quietly commands his scenes with a hushed intensity that serves as a relief to Mr. Bloom's droopy sensitivity and much of the rest of the cast's gnashing and bellowing. Only an entertaining Jeremy Irons, in the role of the Jerusalem king's closest adviser, has a role juicy enough to withstand such furious scenery chewing.


How it all comes down will be familiar to students of religion and cinematic spectacles alike. Mr. Scott and Mr. Monahan play fast and loose with facts and figures, but here the chief difference between history and Hollywood is that there are few bad guys outside of Guy de Lusignan (Marton Csokas), a baron whose dastardliness is immediately signaled by his French accent. ''Give me a war,'' he growls to his henchman, played by Brendan Gleeson like some holy evil fool, complete with rolling eyeballs and a very strange dye job. Mr. Gleeson and the unfortunately cast Eva Green, as Balian's hot-to-trot illicit love interest, a desperate housewife who appears to live in some kind of fabulous day spa, bring ''Kingdom of Heaven'' perilously close to camp, which is depressing for a filmmaker of Mr. Scott's gifts.


Equally at home in the future and the past, Mr. Scott seems born to direct epics. His ravishing visual style, characterized by a fetishistic attention to surface detail and unrelenting beauty, can work wonders with big subjects, but this is also a director who needs actors powerful enough to shoulder narrative and emotional extremes. One of the reasons that ''Gladiator'' worked as well as it did is that its star, Russell Crowe, could credibly put across one of Mr. Scott's typically anguished and existentially lonely heroes while wearing a skirt and gargling some very unfortunate lines. It takes an actor as self-serious as Mr. Crowe to carry the weight of Mr. Scott's ambitions; it also takes a story Mr. Scott himself can really believe in for the filmmaker to do the same.


''Kingdom of Heaven'' is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). The film contains a great deal of bloody violence with lots of impaled flesh and a few decapitations, among other outrages. It also features some discreet lovemaking.

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"Forgive them for they know not what they do..."

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Brego
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nice job bro! /no1

astig tong pelikula na to, kung ikukumpara mo sa ibang epics na ipinalabas(except LOTR).... mas maganda pa to sa kanila... One of the Best Movies of 2005!

ang pinakagusto ko ditong character eh yung Hospitaler Monk na nakasuot ng Black Tunic at White Cross hehehe... tsaka si Tiberius, ang galing ni Jeremy Irons iportray ang isang battle-hardened Knight na nawalan ng faith sa kanyang paniniwala sa Crusades!

si Balian naman, Hmm Orlando Bloom kasi eh... pero maganda pa rin ang performance nya para sakin sa pelikula na ito /no1

Overall, recommended to sa mga mahihilig sa mga Epic Movies! /heh
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Skaray

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Frankly, the movie's quite disappointing for me. Well for a movie of this genre, I expected much more dramatic fight scenes, I expected it to capture the essence of war, I expected a lot of action.

But sadly, the war scenes were often "cut", except for the final one which was greatly detailed in the start but all of sudden, it ended with another "cut".

Story wise however, I have to say it's a good watch. It mainly revolves around a young blacksmith who soon discovers truths about his life and later on sets on a journey to look for clues which would tell him about hi destiny. He fights hard, he conquers obstacles that comes in his way, he overcomes tragic losses in his life and finally he is seen defending the very walls of Jerusalem against the Muslim faction.

It is a time of peace between 2 of the most popular religions in the world, the Christians and the Muslims. It's the time wherein the Christians have resided over Jerusalem, which was formerly of Muslim residence. However, some people still can't control their hatred against the oppositon even at a time of peace. Muslims are still hoping that they would once again reclaim Jerusalem, the land that was taken from theirs and they believe that it rightfully belongs to them. The Muslim launch an attack, only to back out into peace again after a decent truce between both leaders.

But as soon as Christianity gains a new leader, a new king, things go terribly wrong. Their new king desires nothing but the destruction of Muslims and is successful at bringing out the hatred of Christians against the Muslims. He breaks the truce, and declares war against the Muslims. The Muslims now find a reason for them to go out to war and reclaim their lost land.

Thus the war starts...in the place they call, the Kingdom of Heaven.
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