Kudüs Fatihi: Selahaddin Eyyubi

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.

It's obvious the kurds will be upset and will give a low rating because the fact is Salahuddin Ayyubi was a kurdish hailed from a kurdish family. Raised by Nur ud din Zengi RA. The music I can agree with its a let down.. alparsalan layer down the benchmark for the music, the show even though is created by The same creators. I also believe even though I have not been the region where it filmed shows far too much greenery where I believe should be more sand mountains than anything. NO SHOW will ever capture u like Ertugrul did.. but still in these time of need to muster up courage. Still a decent watch.

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.

I've been binge watching a lot of shows lately. American, British and Turkish. I have never been as glued as I am right now with this show. Keep in mind the episodes are long and yet I'm glued. This beats any Hollywood show I have ever seen. It's a masterpiece. Most tv shows I have seen usually start slow and have a climax then die down again. This show is different. It starts hot right out of the gates. You don't have to wait episode after episode for the story to unfold. Keeps you glued and intuned from the first moment. The cinemagraphy is amazing. The main lead is amazing. This is the first time I watch a show that feels complete.

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.