| RATING: | 80% |
| FORMAT: | DVD |
Reminiscent of Hell in the Pacific and Enemy Mine, this is a parable about the Christian Crusades of the medieval period in Europe. It exemplifies the White Christian need to combine faith with force because – despite the teachings of The Christ – in the pragmatic world of global politics, faith is not enough to move mountains. That these mountains do not need moving, since they belong to someone else, does not occur to these Christian soldiers and is the main theme of this clever movie.
The film takes allegorical form in which characters stand in for their religions as a whole – like the old jokes about the Englishman, the Irishman and the Scotsman. Here we have a Christian, a Muslim and a Jew – along with a beautiful woman (Mapi GALAN), who somehow manages to keep them from killing each other.
Tim ABELL plays the Christian as a moral blank undergoing a crisis of conscience over his celibacy – GALAN is an inevitably direct challenge to this – and his inevitably violent religion (Christianity); springing from the hate-fueled nature of a religion claiming to be the creation of a god of love. Here, dramatic characterization plays a secondary role to ideas; the prime one being that Christians are presented as armed assassins of the faith - and nothing more. That the crusader begins the movie lost in the desert is a perfect analogy for a religion lost in its own bloodlust, death worship and pleasure denial - and of how far it has strayed from Jesus' teachings with its self destructive White supremacism and its failure to make the world a more pacific place.
This is a superior treatment of its theme than evidenced by Kingdom of Heaven. Nevertheless, the central character - as the female representative of the feminine principle - is underwritten and not as powerful a presence as she should be. Needless to say, the relationship of this film to the current (2003) White crusades in Iraq and Afghanistan is patently obvious.
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