A new trailer for Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven (20th Century Fox, May 6) is up and running, and it seems…well, like a class act, certainly, but also damned familiar. It’s Gladiator again with a sword-and-arrow battle in a shadowed, blue-tinted forest and those same CG snowflakes in the air. It’s Alexander again with a massive army on horseback charging across a dusty desert plain. It’s Troy again with Orlando Bloom, playing Balian of Ibelin, a young blacksmith in Jerusalem, helping to defend his besieged city. Let’s hope the Fox marketers can push their way past this, because I want this film to make it. It’s about what we’re doing in Iraq now, of course. That’s a given.
