I first saw “Kingdom of Heaven” at the dearly missed Arclight Hollywood on opening day in 2005, and remember feeling like I’d just watched the proof of concept for Ridley Scott’s “Lawrence of Arabia.” Here was an ambitious adventure about Balian (Orlando Bloom), a young French blacksmith who, still mourning the death of his wife, inexplicably murders a priest (Michael Sheen) and joins his estranged Crusader father (Liam Neeson) on a journey to the Holy Land. Balian is not a true believer, but, rather, a seeker. He wants to improve the lives of the people who toil on his father’s estate in Jerusalem, and expresses disgust at the savagery of the Muslim-hating Knights Templar.

The Director’s Cut of “Kingdom of Heaven” reveals that the priest, who is actually Balian’s half-brother, desecrated the corpse of our protagonist’s dead wife (who killed herself after a miscarriage). From this point, Balian is a haunted man desperate for purpose, which he finds by teaching his dependents how to irrigate the land. At the same time, he falls in love with Princess Sibylla (Eva Green), the sister of leper King Baldwin IV (a masked Edward Norton) and a woman who is mired in a loveless marriage with the power-mad, Templar-friendly Guy de Lusignan (Martin Csokas).

I’d like to say Bloom is the biggest beneficiary of Scott’s cut, but Balian is such a gloomy Gus that he’s never allowed to do much more than glower. Green, however, comes vibrantly, tragically alive as a miserably married woman whose life is her son — and when she realizes her boy is doomed to suffer as mightily as her brother has through his soon-to-end life, she euthanizes him as painlessly as possible. This 17-minute subplot was completely excised from the Theatrical Cut, which basically turned Sibylla into little more than a flirty distraction for Balian. It also cost Green a slam-dunk Best Supporting Actress nomination.

When you empathize with or, at the very least, understand with the characters’ complicated motivations, the climactic battle sequence roars as if the fate of the world hangs in the balance — which, nearly a millennium later off-screen, it still does. What’s different now is that people possess weapons that can wipe out those who worship the wrong god. And to the victor, they maniacally reason, goes the spoils of the Holy Land — which, as King Baldwin IV explains, must always be a place for believers and even non-believers. “All are welcome in Jerusalem,” he says. “Not because it is expedient, but because it is right.” That our inability to understand this has resulted in an ongoing genocide makes “Kingdom of Heaven” more relevant than ever.