Knightfall Season 1 UK Region

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This purports to be the story of the Knights Templar, but for a History Channel production, there is precious little history involved. Rather than portraying the history of the Knights Templar, this is a recycled version of the Arthurian legend, complete with characters named after the Round Table knights and an affair with the lead knight with the king’s (the knight’s close friend) wife. The writers clearly have no understanding of Medieval mores, the Church, or feudalism. It’s more of a sword and sorcery story than history, with absolutely no authenticity other than the costumes.- Kindle Customer

I have read everything about the Templars, including their Templar Rule Book. Historically, Philip went after the Templars’ MONEY. that was the real motivation. The plot so far looks like they may imply that it was Landry’s adulterous relationship with his queen that serves as the reason. If so, that isn’t true. Philip needed money to pay for wars and crusades and the Templars had lots of it. They were the first international bankers. They lived simply but accrued massive wealth.Although the queen’s affair with Landry makes for a steamier story line, the historical reason for their fall was Philip’s greed for their vast wealth. But it is still a great program. Historically accurate in some respects. They did refer to the Muslims as Saracens in that era- Sheryl Baldwin

What could have been. I am far from an expert on the Knights Templar but I know more than the average human as this is one of my favorite historical subjects. Maybe if I knew less about the subject I could have enjoyed it better. When “Kingdom of Heaven” with Orlando Bloom in it seems more historically accurate and plausible than a show by the history channel, I am going to have problems with it. After watching the wonderfully made Vikings by the history channel,that had a good mixture of fact, guess work and fiction, I was expecting big things from this tittle. And was greatly disappointed. Where the Vikings filled in the blanks of what we know with educated guesses, Knightfall decided to make up a completely new fiction that often had the barest connection to the facts. It was like the writers took a very interesting and intriguing historical subject and decided they could do better by rewriting a mid-evil soap opera that had very little to do with the Knights Templar other than the title. For instance, what purpose did it serve to change the reason why the Pope and the King of France turned on the Templars? Why does every other Templar have a Knights of the Round table name? I just did not get why the writers felt the need to change the far more interesting facts for Hollywood tripe we have all seen a hundred times before.

It’s not that the show is bad. It is just not up to how the Vikings was handled. I often found myself playing with my phone during large segments of the show. Not really caring what I was watching and only continuing to watch because I wanted to finish the series. What really was hard to handle was about half way through the series a character was killed. You will know what I speak of by the betrayal and fire at the end of the scene. As your watching the death unfold, your sort of thinking to yourself, “is something like this likely to happen?” Just when you convince yourself maybe, I guess it could, they reveal the murder was part of a well conceived overly complicated plot. Not necessarily to kill the character but for the political consequences resulting in the death. All that is fine but after you watch the scene of the death play out, you quickly realize a series of very unlikely random events must happen in an exact order for the plan to work. And you think to yourself, “who would make such a plan that if one of 10 very unlikely events went wrong the plan would fail spectacularly. These type of plans happened several times during the show and only further help to dissolve any historical creditably I still had. And not to mention the several times characters make HUGE deductive discoveries based on so little facts that Sherlock Holmes would be proud. Example. One disgraced protagonist figures out a huge secret that will end up being the excuse the King uses to turn on the Templars. He figures this out by searching back years in his memory and deciding totally random and uneventful and forgettable events no one would ever remember, must mean that he has unearthed this secret that no one at the time ever noticed.. He has absolutely No proof at all other than his memories and stringing a number of guesses together in a certain order to reveal the truth. Of course the disgraced protagonist goes to the King with his theory and the King pretty much just takes the protagonist at his word even though he is a proven liar, manipulator and escaped convict.

So, if you just want a somewhat interesting show that has dabs of historical fact spread out though the show then you may enjoy Knightfall way more than I did.

-Glenn Corbett

DVD Wholesale Main Features :   

Actors: Tom Cullen, Jim Carter, Pádraic Delaney, Simon Merrells, Juilian Ovenden
Format: PAL
Language: English
Region: Region 2
Classification: 15
Studio: Lionsgate Home Entertainment
DVD Release Date: 24 Sept. 2018
ASIN: B07FPQ5PYN