King Arthur the Movie

My wife is highly entertained whenever we go to historical movies. On the way out she usually gets a free history lesson along with a review. Last night we went an saw King Arthur. Since Arthur is 99.9% myth, it is hard to get it wrong, but they managed, against all odds, to succeed anyway. It was awful, awful in a way that even having Keira Knightley essentially undressed for battle could not help.

I think that the real problem was that they wanted to have Gladiator meets Bernard Cornwell’s The Winter King. As a result of their efforts, they captured the worst of both and none of the good.

Even if they had featured Keira Knightley in an explicit lesbian scene the movie still would have sucked. Yeah, it was that bad. In fact, Keira Knightley naked throughout the movie, with a gratuitous lesbian scene would not have done it.

They captured an Arthur who was ethical and gave him heroic qualities, but took away the nobility of the character. Lancelot’s flaws that gave him such difficulties either as a hero or as a villain were removed from his character. And perhaps most symptomatic of the problems the movie had, they robbed Merlin of his magick.

Indeed, they robbed the legend of all magick—that was the real flaw, to remove all the things in the tale that give one a sense of awe and wonder at the hero, Arthur.