BEFORE: To wrap up Britfest, it seems like I need to move away from real kings and include a fictional one, and so I find myself back on King Arthur, for the third time this year. And I still have one Arthurian film to go, but I won't be able to get to the last one until next month, just before back-to-school films.
Stephen Dillane, who played King Edward I in "Outlaw King", carries over to play Merlin today.
THE PLOT: A demystified take on the tale of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.
AFTER: Depending on where you stand, this is either an updating of the Arthurian legends for today's audiences, or a complete bastardization of classic fiction. Because they threw a lot of the familiar parts of the story out, and tried to add a bunch of elements from contemporary action movies. Some people may be so used to that form that they may not notice the difference - but when Guinevere is shooting arrows and fighting alongside the Knights of the Round Table, that tends to feel a little bit like they held a focus group and asked people what they'd like to see in a movie, and obviously in today's society you'd see more active women, and a queen back then wouldn't do stuff like this (but then again, she probably wouldn't do tend to horses and do stable chores either, as seen in "Camelot").
One point of view says that Arthur, Lancelot and Guinevere never existed anyway, so what's the harm in turning their story on its ear and making them into different characters? Again, it depends on how you value classic fiction and how mutable you want your stories to be. They sort of merged Guinevere's story with Merlin's here, making them come from the same tribe of Woads, whatever that is. And they moved the whole story back a few centuries to take place around the fall of the Roman Empire, attempting to morph Roman centurions into medieval knights and basically pretend that the Dark Ages never happened. Supposedly the Roman Empire needed people to help defend Hadrian's Wall in Great Britain, so they drafted people from across Europe to serve 15 years in the military, not counting the amount of time it would take to travel from wherever to the U.K.
It's at least an interesting way to explain why knights from all over would head to Britain and form the equivalent of Camelot's court, with the Round Table expressing a sort of Roman democracy or socialism, where nobody sits at the head of the table. But it's a bit weird that Rome had turned Catholic by this point, and therefore there's an Emperor AND a Pope, plus half of the soldiers practice some kind of pagan religion, so there's no consistency in what everyone believes or is fighting for. Whose interests are the knights serving by going on this one last mission, before their service is over, they become free men, and the Empire collapses, rather conveniently all at the same time?
It's also very unclear who the villains are, at least for a while. The knights are there to guard Hadrian's Wall and the territory south of it from the Woads, but then they're sent on a mission to rescue a family from the Saxons. Wait, which tribe is the dangerous one again? The Woads turn out to be a bunch of forest-dwelling hippie types led by Merlin, but the Saxons are real badasses, with actual weapons and stuff. But they seem very crude and brutish and dumb, at least compared with the knights (who are also pretty crude and brutish, but at least they fight with smarter tactics).
I honestly had to check to see if this film and "Outlaw King" had the same writers, because the two movies share some key story elements - a small army is vastly outnumbered, but gains an advantage by putting the terrain to good use. In "Outlaw King" that meant digging a trench and using the muddiness of the highland bogs, but here it's a large frozen river, and the knights know to break their marching step and tread lightly, yet the Saxons just keep on marching in step. I know that an army needs to stop marching when crossing a bridge, I didn't realize that also goes for ice, but I guess it makes sense. Plus there's the whole idea that marching across the country increases the size of the army, yesterday it was the various clans joining up with Robert the Bruce, and today it's the Woads joining the fight against the Saxons. Yeah, I think we're dealing with a formula here.
They really throw the whole Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot love triangle away here, Guin and Lance exchange a few looks over the battlefield in the thick of it, and that's about all. So, no greater argument against arranged marriages or advice on what to do when you meet the love of your life JUST a bit too late. And the "sword in the stone" plot only appears in a flashback of that time that Woads attacked young Arthur's village, and he had to pull Excalibur out of his father's burial mound in order to save his mother from a burning building. Umm, exactly how was a sword going to help with that?
The film ends with the (remaining) knights no longer wanting to return to their homelands, but realizing that they've spent so much time in England that it's become their kingdom, with Arthur as king after marrying Guinevere, uniting the former Romans and the Woads. Well, I guess home is where you hang your hat, even if it's a crown. But the film pitched itself as the more "realistic" version and on the poster it says it's the "untold true story that inspired the legend". This seems like an unsupportable sales pitch, even if you look past the oxymoronic "true story" - well, which is it, is it true or a story? And "untold"? You're telling it now, so how can it be "untold"? It seems like a long way to go to cover up the fact that this is an even more fictional version of a thing that never happened.
As a bonus, the soundtrack manages to use a bunch of swirling Hans Zimmer motifs left over from the "Pirates of the Caribbean" franchise...
Also starring Clive Owen (last seen in "Hemingway & Gellhorn"), Ioan Gruffudd (last seen in "102 Dalmatians"), Mads Mikkelsen (last seen in "At Eternity's Gate"), Joel Edgerton (last seen in "Life"), Hugh Dancy (last seen in "Adam"), Ray Winstone (last seen in "Sexy Beast"), Ray Stevenson (last seen in "Big Game"), Keira Knightley (last seen in "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales"), Stellan Skarsgard (last seen in "Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again"), Til Schweiger (last seen in "Atomic Blonde"), Sean Gilder, Pat Kinevane, Ivano Marescotti (last seen in "The Talented Mr. Ripley"), Ken Stott (last seen in "Café Society"), Lorenzo De Angelis, Stefania Orsola Garello, Alan Devine, Charlie Creed-Miles (last seen in "Hereafter"), Johnny Brennan, David Murray, Ned Dennehy, Dawn Bradfield, Maria Gladkowska, Clive Russell (also carrying over from "Outlaw King"), Shane Murray-Corcoran, Elliot Henderson-Boyle, Owen Teale (last seen in "Robin Hood (1991)), Graham McTavish (last seen in "Aquaman").
RATING: 5 out of 10 trebuchets (ah, THERE they are, where were they yesterday?)
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