A knight out

[gervase_fen]

Thanks to a friendly publicity person working at the local multiplex, I was given a dozen or so tickets for a preview screening of "King Arthur". The trailers that I'd seen had more or less given the game away - that the film was not going to be very good. And so it proved.

Here's a film with an identity crisis - is it "Gladiator"? (Screenwriter David Franzoni co-wrote that one with William Nicholson and John Logan). Is it "Braveheart"? (Some of the locations - and most of the extras - looked quite familiar). Is it all those siege/battle/Arthurian influenced bits of "Lord of the Rings"? No, it's a confused and confusing bombastic take on a historical period so distant that it's hard to get upset at the liberties taken.

Clive Owen has been on the verge of a career as a leading man in Hollywood for, oh, about six years now (since "Croupier"). Sadly, this won't do the trick for him - he has nothing to work with in the script beyond hints of a troubled Christian conscience. Keira Knightley, thankfully, doesn't appear for a while, sparing the audience her emphatic line-readings and pouting. Merlin, who could have been an enigmatic, mysterious off-stage manipulator is merely another guerilla rebel in fetching green and blue 'woad' make-up.

The highlight of the film is a battle on a frozen lake - a sequence which apparently is a refugee from the original script of "Gladiator", and one which William Nicholson adapted and used in "Firesong". Just when the film seems to have got its act together, though, we then cut back to Hadrian's Wall - with no explanation or caption as to how much time has passed.

I'm sure there's a decent revisionist Arthurian epic to be made - but this isn't it, and one can only speculate on what might have been, the woad not taken.

Comments

[pellegrina.livejournal.com]

I agree with you, sadly, because I'd been vaguely hoping the film might lead to a renaissance of Society A.

I saw a press screening a few weeks ago, and like you, felt the film was confused. It purported to give The Truth (TM), and then plonked Roman villas north of Hadrian's Wall containing the favourite of the Pope who is mysteriously in charge of the Roman legions. It makes the knights Sarmatian to give some spurious "oppressed victims of colonial empire" to its heroes who are in the colonial empire's army, so they can bang on about Freedom in a modern way. (So much for history.) The treatment of the Arthur/Guinevere/Lancelot triangle is so understated that it would require telepathy for the love story to make it into the legend at all. And it commits the cardinal sin of imposing a happy ending.

Pity, because there were some stirring moments, such as the scene when Arthur appears over the ridge, holding the banner, before the final battle, and I liked Clive Owen's Arthur. Ioan Gruffudd made the best of an embarrassing part. But Keira Knightley was badly miscast; the role needed an older woman, one who might legitimately have the kind of power the character seems to. And as you said, it would have been nice to have a Merlin who did more than grunt.

What a missed opportunity, and now we have to wait another decade.

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

"...I'd been vaguely hoping the film might lead to a reniassance of Society A"

I hadn't, really, just because there's something about Society A that takes so much energy out of me. DSoc and SocT are taking more of my time than I expected, and for all my protestations I find these societies addictive.

[pellegrina.livejournal.com]

Well, obviously a renaissance that didn't involve more from me than passing on banquet know-how to a keen new generation. If DSoc and SocT are allowed to persist, why not Society A?

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

I think that there were probably circumstances in whicg Society A could have survived, and Cellis has recently remonstrated with me when I said that its days were obviously numbered, as she had been a new person who might have carried on had there been more enthusiasm from this quarter.

In the end it all comes down to luck, and people; SocA didn't gather enough, nor lose certain of its veterans.

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

I suspect that this film will be a talking point at the (Re)Creating Arthur conference the week after next. Whether I will have seen it by then is another matter, and depends on progress with my paper, where I apply myself in fits and starts.

The problem with a revisionist Arthurian epic is that (if by 'revisionist' we mean taking into account the work of the most respected and combative scholars working on the Arthurian period) it can't be done in such a way that leaves a recognizable Arthur - Arthur would either not appear, or would be a giant or fairy, as British mythology is reconstructed among Irish lines. King Arthur seems to take its lead from the writings of less reputable scholars who take a cavalier attitude to their sources, such as Linda Malcor and Norma Lorre Goodrich, and see evidence of stories having survived from late antiquity into the middle ages when there is none.

[pellegrina.livejournal.com]

I felt their premise would have been better served by following Mary Stewart or Rosemary Sutcliffe with a Romanized Arthur standing for civilized values against barbarian war-bands, perhaps with an Irish mythological Merlin providing supernatural interest, but then you wouldn't be able to portray Arthur as reluctant mixed blood freedom fighter against the colonial oppressor.