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This analysis of 'Kingdom of Heaven' (2005) will consider how the movie's five plot points create the story's deep structure. These discrete story points include the 'Inciting Incident' in Act 1, 'Turning Points 1 and 2' in Act 2, and the 'Crisis Decision' and 'Climax' in Act 3. Spoiler alert: this structural analysis will reveal crucial plot moments; you may prefer to read this after viewing the film.

This movie's back story is as follows: Balian (Orlando Bloom), a blacksmith's assistant, lives with his pregnant lover in a small French village. He aspires to nothing more than to be left in peace with his family. The opening action sees the lover, an unmarried woman, die in childbirth. By order of the village priest, who, because he believes her death was voluntary, and thus a suicide, orders her corpse beheaded and given a non-Christian burial. Balian's father, Godfrey of Ibelin (Liam Neeson), arrives and offers to take Balian to the Holy Land. Balian refuses, a decision Godfrey accepts, and departs.

A Hollywood movie's 'Inciting Incident', which occurs usually in the first 1/2 hour, challenges the hero to respond to a new development or opportunity. To achieve that response, the hero must internally expand, irrevocably changing his life. The hero is then thrown into a series of escalating accommodations on his journey to understand and solve the Inciting Incident's original problem.

This film's Inciting Incident occurs when the priest, who is foolishly accustomed to having the power to speak with impunity, caustically invites Balian to move away, arguing that he isn't liked in the village. Balian, who didn't realize the priest had ordered his lover's beheading and non-Christian burial, is appalled and angered when the priest refers to it scornfully. Balian defends his lover's memory by killing the priest. To avoid the authorities he decides to join his father after all, on his venture to the Holy Land.

This film's director, Ridley Scott, a British leftist who grovels before fashionable European ideology, clearly believes that organized religion is a force for evil in the world. (Not Islam, however, which is turned upside-down and portrayed as unreservedly benign, notwithstanding copious evidence to the contrary.) The left, as ever, completely ignores the facts, whether the facts are historical, scientific, or, as here, religious.

Turning Point 1. After arriving in the Holy Land, and meeting the local European gentry, Balian settles on his inherited baronial land.

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