Leave it to Hollywood to inject secular-humanist values into a religious war. In trying to cook up a story about a simple blacksmith thrust into the middle of the Crusades, Ridley Scott shies away from approaching any weighty issues and is instead content to serve up dish palatable to liberal Tinseltown, garnished with pretty-boy Orlando Bloom.
The year is 1186 and Bloom is Balian, a French blacksmith in a muddy hamlet. We're told by title cards that Europe is suffering under poverty and oppression, and we're obviously supposed to draw a parallel between the Dark Ages and the Angry Left's vision of America under Bush the Junior. Heaped upon that subtext is the idea that faith and religion are evil (make that white, European faith and religion, as pious Muslims are all sympathetic). Balian's child has died during birth and his wife has killed herself—a mortal sin today and one viewed as so grave in the Middle Ages that it precludes her from burial on Church ground and requires her head to be chopped off. During the burial, the first of the film's several morally weak priests steals her gold crucifix.
Balian is absent from the burial, blacksmithing his broken heart away, when Baron Godfrey (Liam Neeson) rides up, announcing that Balian is his bastard son and asking him to join his small party on their way back to Jerusalem and the Second Crusade, Western Europe's two-century-plus-long struggle against Arabia to control the Holy Land.
Balian at first refuses, but after murdering the priest for robbing his wife's corpse, he changes his mind, hoping to free his and his wife's souls from Hell by praying at the site of the Crucifixion. Later that day, the group of battle-hardened men are attacked by another band of professional soldiers, these sent by an arch-bishop to bring Balian back to face charges. The speed with which news traveled in the 12th century was apparently much greater than what scholars have thought, the first of a library's worth of inconsistencies. Having only just learned how to wield a weapon, Balian emerges as an expert swordsman. His famed-warrior father doesn't fare so well and dies from his wounds before they reach Jerusalem.
One shipwreck later, and after Balian has killed one of the greatest warriors in the Middle East—who attacks him from horseback with a spear and then on foot with a sword but hey Balian has been battered by a storm that left him as sole survivor and then trudged countless miles through the desert without water so it only makes sense—he finds himself in the holy city. Then, in the midst of the hundreds of inhabitants, Godfrey's men find Balian and quickly pledge their allegiance, showing Balian to his new castle.
From here, the story just gets sillier. The commoner is accepted by all the nobles and the leprosy-riddled king of Jerusalem (Edward Norton, who was smart enough to hide behind a silver mask) except for the power-hungry Guy de Lusignan (Marton Csokas, who's perma-scowl is going to require some serious Botox) of the Knights Templar and husband to the king's sister, Princess Sibylla. Experiencing a crisis of faith after his unanswered prayers, Balian is knighted, taking a vow to be true to God (a line left out of the trailers) and protect the weak. I'll give you one guess as to what part of his oath he obeys, and for a clue, he'll happily commit adultery in a few days.
Through a series of court intrigues that only a touchy-feely, politically correct king would allow, a truce with Saladin (Ghassan Massoud) comes to an end and Balian finds himself in control of Jerusalem, defending it against 200,000 angry Arabs. Thankfully, the blacksmith who has also proven himself to be a skilled horseman and able to read and write is also a brilliant strategist. Then comes The Speech, screenwriter William Monahan's version of Henry V's St. Crispin's Day. Only in this case, Balian decrees to all assembled—pilgrims, priests, faithful, Crusaders—that they are not to make their final stand for God. Not for King, and not even for country. They are to make it for all of the little people. And now that he's introduced a secular Democratic platform to the Middle Ages, Balian goes and introduces democracy itself, making everyone a knight. Even the page to yet another evil priest. After the necessary yet poorly filmed carnage to remind us that war is nasty, a truce is declared and Balian and the rest of MedievalMoveOn.org are sent packing. And just in case we didn't get the message, the film's last title cards tell us that a thousand years later, peace is still a rare commodity in the Middle East, implying violence there is permanent among a little people, a silly people—greedy, barbarous and cruel. Free elections in Israel, Afghanistan and Iraq, popular uprisings in Lebanon and Egypt, and a nicer Libya aside, of course.