Why Kingdom of Heaven’s Director’s Cut Is Better

It was another lazy Sunday. And I like them at this point. You start to appreciate them more and more. I let YouTube’s algorithm land me on a few chess videos. Later, it pushed me straight into a scene from Kingdom of Heaven. It’s just beautiful. Hard to resist. The visuals, the atmosphere, the quotes.

Long story short, I watched the director’s cut end to end. Yeah, I know. Not the first time. Definitely not the last. And here’s an interesting thing. If you’ve only seen the theatrical cut, you probably weren’t impressed. I don’t blame you. It’s shallow and half the story is missing. Honestly, it doesn’t have the same taste as the director’s cut. Let’s first see the scene which lead me to the full movie.

So what exactly makes the director’s cut so much better? Being an engineer, I can’t help using the 5 Whys technique to break it down.

Because the theatrical cut was trimmed way too much. I’m not talking about small cosmetic cuts. Someone took a chainsaw and cut it in half. When you watch a theatrical cut, you sense that something is missing, that characters act erratically, that the story leaps around. And it isn’t your imagination.