Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Mighty Crusaders!

Article theme: Crusader - Saxon

Me and the boys gather round the sacred gaming chair (2025, colourised).

The Muslim conquests started in the 7th Century and devastated the Persian and Byzantine empires, not because the Arabs had superior technology, strategy or tactics, but because both empires had outsourced large swathes of their militaries to Arab mercs who simply defected to Islam en masse. No one has learned anything from this, as the Respectable Bipartisan Consensus for the west under the Global American Empire has been to continuously wage war on Muslim countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Palestine while simultaneously importing Muslim immigrants into Europe at replacement levels.

Great job, asshole! You really thought that one through.

The same staggering endemic historical illiteracy and incuriosity explains why most westerners now think that The Crusades were unprovoked wars of aggression by Evil Christians instead of the most provoked and justified wars ever fought in history - a misnomer actively astroturfed by every single institution in the first world in a campaign of systematic DARVO that would shame Amber Heard. Pope Urban II called the First Crusade in 1095 after four and a half centuries of nonstop Muslim pillage and sporadic efforts at defence and reconquest by heroes such as Charles Martell and Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (El Cid Campeador).

I choose to believe they were this dripmaxxed IRL.

But Italian kinograph The Mighty Crusaders, very loosely based on Jerusalem Delivered by Torquato Tasso, the epic poem that should rightly be renowned the Christian Iliad, extends thoroughly unwarranted grace to the forces that occupied Jerusalem at the time of the First Crusade. Just as in Homer's oftener regaled narrative, this siege has heroes on both sides.

For never was a story of more woe, than this of Tancredi and his mid MENA ho.

Macchiato Luigi plays Tancredi, the mightiest crusader of them all. Ferrari Pepperoni plays his archenemy and love interest, Clorinda. Gabagool Ovaheah plays Armida, the ambiguously witchy femme fatale. The epic poem has straight-up magic spells being thrown about this way and that, but the movie, much like the 2000s Troy, plays down any hint of supernatural bewitchment, rendering some of the characters' choices dumber than we might allow had the sorcery remained overt. Crusaders also treats us to some Star Trekian fight choreography:

"To win a swordfight, whip your sword around in the air like you're a helicopter" - Shadiversity

But as dumbed-down an adaptation as it inevitably is, it's still based to have an aesthetic kino celebrating those who took the cross, to say nothing of a film set in the middle ages with a colour palette beyond brown and grey.

It's also funny how Italian it all is.

Watch The Mighty Crusaders, read the poem, press S to spit on Ridley Scott, etc.