Truly a labour of love Ridley Scott's Directors Cut of Kingdom of Heaven strides some 4 discs full of as much geeky information as you can possibly take in - and a substantial amount besides. 18 hours of extras in fact and that's not including how long it will take you to wade through an imposing collection of design and production stills.
First of all the film looks and sounds superb: moody, colour filtered and drenched in colour and artistic gore and drama with beautiful choral music alongside the energetic sound effects. This is an epic presented in appropriately grand style.
With all the extras, well, where to start... How about Commentaries?
For a set of discs this complete it is interesting that Ridley Scott does not get a track to himself - this being the Directors Cut after all. Instead he has to bunk up with the writer William Monaghan and, even more oddly, lead actor Orlando Bloom. It makes for a bizarre blend: Scott is both deeply pretentious and yet admirable in his obsession to detail but his input is, necessarily for the format, rather patchy; Monaghan (unintentionally) hilariously talks of his historical research and his total disregard for any dull little detail like attributing actions to the correct historical figures, inventing a character's illnesses and the like; Orlando meanwhile proves himself a little at a loss since his comments largely revolve around how much of a laugh they were having this day or how great the stuntman was the next.
It's not that any of these contributions are uninteresting but poorly mixed together in a single track it becomes repetitice, ego stroking and misses the interest of what should be present here: a single director's commentary; a writer and researcher track discussing how history and fiction blended and why changes were made; an actors commentary with Mr Bloom joined with Jeremy Irons, Liam Neeson, Marton Csokas, David Thewlis, Ed Norton et al reminiscing in a more natural conversational manner with less ego-rubbing and more points of interest.
There are two more commentaries which are less controversial perhaps because both are essentially technical and do exactly what they say on the tin: sound editor Dody Dorn describes his work on one commentary; an executive producer, the visual effects supervisor and the 1st assistant director give their views on the final commentary.
Alongside commentaries are several subtitle trivia tracks, notably the "Enginers guide" a sort of pub quiz guide to the film. Though mostly populated with genuinely interesting historical and technical details there are some extremely dull and unnecessary luvvie and PR elements that creep in more and more the longer the film runs. These include such gems as quotes from the lead actress about her costume and trivia on which of the crew are Ridley Scott's pals... this is not anything most viewers are likely to be interested in and it's clearly all covered in the featurettes if anything interesting is to be said. If they could have made like Dragnet and just stuck to the facts it would be even better but the Enginers Guide is still a fun geeks guide to detail.
Featurettes are present in abundance along with photo galleries. The two on wardrobe and academic historians' points of views offer genuinely fascinating details of the production and the story. The historians are very forgiving of the film but praise it's "texture" and feel for the middle ages and it's hard to disagree with the fact that Kingdom of Heaven does present a brutal but beautifully detailed view. The galleries are full of interesting snaps but unfortunately explanation is in short supply and almost always consists of a screen or two of text before the pictures which can be scrolled through but are not accompanied by music from the soundtrack, are not organised in a more accessible thumnail galleries and generally lose brownie points for being unwieldy to navigate through.
Of particular note are drawings from Scott himself. These "Ridleygrams" are interesting but there are so many and they so resemble storyboard or comic book in appearance that it seems weird not to present them in a better format? In general it seems the intimidating volume of material has scared the disc designers into a rather tepid presentation with bangs and whizzes only on the main menus and no consideration about the best way to access and enjoy the wealth of content included on the 4 discs.
And what else is there? Loads of stuff from the publicity and press junkets that preceeded the film's release, more galleries, sketches, outtakes with commentaries and essentially every bloomin' thing you could ever want (including a FULL early edition of the script for uber-geeks). It may have all the navigational structure of a bowl of spaghetti but it's hard to fault the completeness of what's there. It's definitely a bonanza set of extras and worth the effort to hunt everything down.
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