The Shrine

They just cut and pasted scenes from Lord of the Rings into it. As far as the characters go, they were all crazy; all 1500 of them. Did I mention the movie had too large of a cast?

Overall it just felt like a movie that capitalized on Lord of the Rings. It didn't flow nearly as smoothly as Lord of the Rings did either.

Nevertheless, in some of its extreme cheesyness, there was a lot of funny stuff, there's a lot of opportunities to make sarcastic remarks throughout it =P

In the cast, some notables are:

Edward Norton, who plays the King of Jerusalem

Liam Neeson who plays a Baron,

Orlando Bloom who is the son of Liam Neeson

Hamish from Braveheart plays an evil Lord who likes to slaughter people

Celeborn from Lord of the Rings plays another Evil Lord who wants to be King of Jerusalem

And Julian Bashir from Star Trek Deep Space 9 plays a Muslim General.



All in all, the plot does not make anyone out to be really evil, except some factions of the crusaders; you might think the Islamic armies are evil if you are racist against Muslims. Afterall, they did have weapons of mass destruction.

This is one movie that should not have been made. The Crusades were a scar in the name of Christianity. You don't make an "epic" out of that. It's like making a epic of the Spainards fighting the "evil" Mayans.

This wasn't really a movie about the Crusades, it took place 100 years after the Crusades in the Kingdom of Jerusalem. It was more or less a movie about a King trying to create a Kingdom where the Jewish, Muslim, and Christian peoples could live at peace. The problem is that there are a lot of corrupt crusaders who cling to the "old ways" of blind slaughtering of non-Christians because "God wills it" and "killing an infidel is not murder, it is the path to heaven."