Kudüs Fatihi: Selahaddin Eyyubi

Well well after a long wait of 2 years, it's finally here and it did not disappoint! From the spectacular scenes and Arab vibe, to the great cast, everything is spot on! The BGM is also great. I just hope they can add better ones. But overall it's great and I believe it can eventually compete with series such KO and UBS. For those who are complaining that they didn't refer the character as Kurdish are just hating for no reason. Just watch the series and enjoy it! There is a few fictional scenes but that's common among all series to contain suspense. Overall it's great so far and I hope they can do even better!

The series started with significant potential, but the writing has been deeply unsatisfactory. From the outset, the main character, Salauddin, appears powerless, surrounded by merely five allies perpetually engaged in recovery tasks-whether it's saving hostages, finding lost tribes, or retrieving ancient artifacts. He lacks any definitive leadership traits. Furthermore, the show misrepresents the historical narrative, offering a shallow, one-dimensional storyline. It's a complete letdown and pales in comparison to 'Kurulus Osman', which is richly layered and compelling enough that it never wears out its welcome.

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.

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.