Saladin: The Conquerer of Jerusalem

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.

As an Iranian, I watched the whole series, and I can say that this show exposes historical distortions used for political propaganda - such as not mentioning that Saladin was of Kurdish origin, or portraying the Grey Wolves as Saladin's allies, even though they didn't exist at the time. Despite these issues, the storytelling in the series is really good, and I enjoyed it. Saladin's character development is very well-crafted and keeps the audience engaged. Even the Crusaders in Jerusalem are portrayed in a way that makes you sympathize with them, and personally, my favorite character in the series is Balian. Overall, I recommend watching this series - just don't expect it to be historically accurate.

Salahuddin Ayubi is perhaps one of the greatest Islamic history which is also recognised by the West. However Türk Pak joint production tv serial simply could not match the greatness of an important chapter of history. Very weak script, poor acting, unimpressive characters, below average production. The script is childish. It is mainly impressed by ertugrul serial so it failed to create its own identity. Not a single character could click. Totally flop serial, waste of time. Ertugrul and Usman serial have left very high bench mark of performance, Salahuddin serial is not even close to that standard. It's better to read a book on Salahuddin Ayubi rather wasting time on this serial.

The actors of the show are well chosen, sets are great, but the downside is the background music. The character of Selahaddin is supposed to be a very strong one, which the actor is ,no doubt, but the background music is so weak that it overshadows the main character .It is loud, very shrill that it hurts the ears. If you can make the music more strong, grand it will greatly help the show. Its music is similar to that of Hyrredin ( another Turkish show) which was very annoying. If someone directly linked to the show, Selahaddin, is reading this review and is able to make this change it will greatly improve its ratings.

No doubt Salahudin Ayyubi is a great historical figure who lived a great life and even his enemies admired him but this show is clearly not a representation of that. It is a very small scale production with poor visual effects and a lack luster repetitive story line which has no depth. What covers most of the episodes is a hand full men chasing each other and fighting in the same locations even the sets are not that good and more importantly it is not even historically accurate. How can you justify 10 to 20 people conquering cities and a sultan who has 20 soldiers who guard the defenses of Damascus. Another thing is that most of the main characters are shown to wear no caps to cover their heads, however this was a necessity in the old times specially in the people of that region. In fact even the Sultan Nurredin has been shown not wearing his crown for more then a dozen episodes. There is no detailing and the characters have been shown wearing the same dresses for almost the whole season.

All of this show highlights the small scale and the small budget of this series. Instead watching this it is better to read a book to learn the legacy of Sultan Selahudin Ayuubi rather than watching this fictional disgrace.