After watching Mehmed: Fetihler Sultani, I turned to this series for another engaging historical story. While I was impressed with that series, this one about the hero Saladin was hampered by a lower production budget and mediocre writing and direction. Real history is fascinating enough; it's not necessary to create fictitious characters and side plots that are repetitive and confusing. Lack of VFX results in "battles" with a handful of participants...more accurately defined as skirmishes, which are choreographed the same way over and over, between Saladin and his "army" of a half-dozen close followers and a dozen or more sacrificial Crusaders. Tactics and actions often make no sense - enemies marked for death are often freed to kill again...cities are conquered with a handful of soldiers...seriously wounded men are magically restored to fighting shape in a single day...women fighting (and usually outfighting) men. It's just silly. Direction, too, suffers - Whenever there is a dramatic scene, we get the facial "reaction shots" from each character; similar shots are held way too long for dramatic effect, and the types of shots and scene framing are repetitive and boring. I found myself fast-forwarding through most every fight scene as they all looked the same. Hardest of all - for a Western viewer - is the difficulty that YouTube's auto-translate has with the script. Turkish must be a hard language to translate; it's sometimes hard to discern past and present, and pronouns are constantly mixed up - we get "she" when referring to men, "he" when referring to themselves...after a while you just get used to it. Also, the dialogue contains so many metaphors that it doesn't translate clearly - the often-flowery language and sentence structure of medieval times becomes hard to grasp for modern ears in translation. Of course, this is not the production's fault, but a side effect of auto translation. Overall, the settings and stagings are well-done; the terrain is a little more lush and wooded than I would expect for its location in the holy land; I know it is not all a desert, as often depicted, but this also feels "off." A decent series overall, but viewers may tire of it after a dozen or so episodes.
