King Arthur

This movie was another product of that early-aughts surge of historical epics in the wake of the success of Gladiator. It had been a while since there had been a major-studio effort about King Arthur, and the initial info about this film seemed to indicate they were focusing on a more historically-plausible interpretation, rather than the more fantastical, romanticized takes we more often get. That turned out not to be at all true, but it did fuel some interest in this before it was released.

It is amusing to me that big-budget films about King Arthur only seem to get worse over time. Excalibur was not a perfect movie, and it didn’t get a lot critical respect at the time of its release, but with the perspective of time it seems like the Platonic ideal of Arthurian movies, and that things have only declined from there, finally descending down to the level of 2017s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword – a film which I will get to sooner than I would like.

King Arthur, the movie, starts with the premise of an actual historical period – the days when the Roman Legions were pulling out of Britain and abandoning it. Rather than Romans or native Britons, Arthur and his knights are depicted as Sarmatian cavalry attached to Roman service, thus forming a possible historical basis for the legend of fearsome mounted warriors. Now, there is historical evidence that some Sarmatian auxiliaries were in Briton about the time this is supposed to be set – 467 AD – but they were probably gone even by the time of the Roman withdrawal, which was actually in 410, and there is no evidence of mounted units in action.

The other problem with this is that the cast of “knights” do not look at all like Sarmatians. An Indo-Iranian people, some Sarmatians were said to be blonde or red-haired, but as a steppe nomad race they likely would have had the long-faced, long-nosed features of their close relatives, the Scythians and the Huns. The actors playing the knights not only don’t look anything like one another, they just look British, largely because they are.

The cast as a whole, however, is amazing, containing not only actors who were big at the time, like Clive Owen as Arthur and Keira Knightley as Guinevere, but a bunch of actors who would go on to being much better known in years to come: Ioan Gruffud, Mads Mikkelsen, Joel Edgerton, Hugh Dancy, Ray Winstone, Stellan Starsgard, and Ray Stevenson – there are so many familiar faces here it’s a constant surprise, and they are all earning their money, turning in better performances than the material really demands.

The story is pretty straightforward, with the ragtag band of warriors first tasked with rescuing a Roman family, and then deciding to stay after the legions leave to fight off the invading Saxons at the climactic Battle of Badon Hill. The theatrical cut was trimmed for violence, but the Director’s Cut on DVD has quite a lot of grit in it. The action choreography is solid if unimaginative, and the gore is satisfying, with a lot of head-chopping and limb-lopping. It could be better, as there are a lot of times characters get hit and act wounded but you can’t see any blood or where they were hit.

The historical accuracy is, overall, a mess, with anachronistic weapons and armor, Romans living north of Hadrian’s Wall, and the Saxons (who already occupied large parts of England at the time) inexplicably invading from across the sea, well north of the wall, and then walking south. The withdrawal of the legions from Britain was finished by 410, while this movie supposedly takes place almost sixty years later. The Picts are called “Woads” for some reason, and aside from painting themselves blue don’t seem to look physically different from the rest of the cast. I do have to say that this is certainly the only major studio film to have a Pelagius cameo , or address the Pelagian Heresy in any way – even if Pelagius actually died in Egypt almost forty years before the year this movie is set.

It’s a solid enough adventure, with a stellar cast and some good action sequences, but the problem with Arthurian movies is you have to either do the romanticized, Excalibur thing, or you have to go the gritty, historical, more realistic route. This movie sold itself as being historical, but then it wasn’t even close to that. So the history nerds didn’t like it, and the people who wanted the high fantasy, Tennyson/Malory approach didn’t like it either. By not committing to one or the other, King Arthur just becomes another action movie with some Arthurian names slapped on it. I can’t help but think that if the filmmakers had gone in a more dark/fantasy direction, with actual magic and the pagan wilderness imagery, this could have been much better. But then I remember that Legend of the Sword went hard with the fantastical elements, and how that turned out, so maybe fantasy is not the way to go here.

There is definitely the potential for a Sword & Sorcery take on Arthurian legends. Start with the grounded, historical idea, then add in some actual dark magic, a world where good and evil are subsumed in the moral necessities of survival in the face of invasion and social disintegration, and you could even throw in some monsters, so long as you imagined them as some kind of prehistoric remnants – like in The 13^th Warrior. You could come up with a dark, bloody, serious tale that would still have some historic plausibility, and could still honor the ideals the Round Table was meant to embody. In fact, it could be all the more powerful if the knights stood all but alone against a dark, chaotic world, striving for ideals they would never reach. That could be awesome.

The Red Fortress

The blood-red stone walls of Hamun rose above the waters of the river, and in their shadow iron legions marched. Dust rose up into the evening sky as rank after rank of Varonan soldiers followed the road up to the rocky promontory where the fortress stood stark against the emerging stars. The first night wind from the desert places whispered cold, and it was welcome, for the way had been long, and the blazing sun of this land was harsh upon the sons of the sea.

Neges, the commander of the fortress, watched from the walls, not certain what he should do. He had received his orders, messages marked with the seal of the king and queen, and yet he distrusted them. Here was an army of a foreign nation moving upon his own soil, and that was not welcome to his heart. Yet he did not have any grounds to refuse their occupation of Hamun, the greatest fortress in the northland, and if what he heard was the truth, then he would need every sword and spear to defend it.

He came down from the tower beside the gate and climbed to his chariot, more for the gravity it would give him than for any need. The land around Hamun was rocky and ill-suited for horse or chariot. Yet he would not meet some foreign general on foot like a farmer. He stood with his guards around him, bronze spearpoints gleaming in the dying sun, and he waited.

Spartacus: Blood and Sand

Bursting onto the scene in 2010 as part of the cultural aftershock of 300, Spartacus: Blood and Sand clearly stands as the pulpiest show ever released on any kind of TV. Produced by Steven DeKnight (a veteran of shows like Buffy, Angel and Dollhouse) the first season went off like a bomb, as nobody had ever seen anything quite this carnal, bloody, and excessive. Taking the well-known story of the leader of the so-called Third Servile War in 73-71 BCE, the show amped everything up to 11 and made a bloody, melodramatic epic for a modern audience.

One of the things that makes the story of Spartacus so popular to rework is that there is not a whole lot of solid information about him. We know he was Thracian (from somewhere in what is now Eastern Europe) and that he was a gladiator. We can tell from his success as a general that he had some military experience and was an excellent tactician. We know he led the largest slave uprising in Roman history, and we know when he died. That’s about it.

The first season of the show stars Andy Whitfield as the titular character, and shows us how he became a slave in the first place and how he ended up in a ludus in Italy, sentenced to be a gladiator. Since we don’t know anything factual about this part of his life, the show is free to invent whatever it wants, and does so. It fills in other named members of the revolt, and adds to them with characters both historical and imaginary.

The first smart thing the show did was reimagine the gladiator school as a hothouse for melodrama, putting in rivalries, jealousies, affairs, hatreds, friendships and betrayals galore. Every character is caught up in multiple different plotlines where they are pulled in different directions, trying to reach their personal ambitions for power, freedom, wealth, or love, all against the backdrop of the brutality and violence of the system of slavery and combat they were caught up in.

Brutality was the other thing the show did right, as they elected to not sugar-coat anything, and in fact did whatever you would call the opposite of that. While shows like Rome strove for historical accuracy, Spartacus went way beyond that into sheer pulp sex and violence. Rather than show tasteful nudity, Blood and Sand was almost wall-to-wall naked flesh and sex so explicit it is still kind of shocking. There was none of this “necessary to the plot” bullshit, and plenty of the nudity and sex was just there to add to the debauched atmosphere. It helped to create a feeling that anything was possible, and you were never sure what the show would do or how far they would go.

And showing most clearly the influence of 300 on the whole idea, the violence in Spartacus was cranked way past anything believable, with plenty of slow-motion and lots of bright, color-corrected blood everywhere. With the saturated digital color, the action scenes are gripping festivals of screaming, hyper-real carnage featuring ripped flesh, severed limbs, and literal buckets of gore.

None of this would work at all if you didn’t have a cast willing to go for it, and the cast of this show really rose to the occasion. Andy Whitfield stars as the hero, but he is almost eclipsed by the rest of the crew, including Manu Bennett hamming it up as Crixus, Nick Tarabay as the serpentine, treacherous Ashur, Peter Mensah as the whip-cracking trainer Doctore, and John Hannah as the cussing, murderous, amoral owner of the ludus, Batiatus. One has to single out Lucy Lawless for bringing a ton of complexity and depth to her role as Lucretia, and at the same time she doesn’t shrink from the sexuality of the role. Everybody here just goes all-out.

Each subsequent season of the show had a different title, and it maybe never recovered entirely from the death of Andy Whitfield in 2011, which necessitated the recasting of the central character with Liam McIntyre. As it moved more into the history of the revolt, the show became less inventive and more a tragedy, which is tonally quite different. The first season stands apart for these and other reasons, though they were all solidly made.

With it’s intense sexuality, gory violence, and overheated melodrama, Spartacus: Blood and Sand is an almost pure pulp entertainment, and that puts it squarely in the wheelhouse of Sword & Sorcery. Adventure writers have spilled oceans of ink over the Roman Empire, and the gladiatorial arena still exercises an enduring fascination even today. Hell, the movies made Conan a gladiator when he never was in Howard’s stories, just because gladiators are so cool. With maybe an undead wizard as the villain instead of a Roman consul, this would be right on target.

The Serpent in Shadow

Malika, Queen of Meru, lay coiled on the heaped cushions of her bedchamber, and she waited for night to fall. Curtains screened away the light of the fading day, and she was glad of it. She had been born a woman, but now she was something other, half-changed in her shape, and her blackened eyes no longer loved the light of the sun. It was Utuzan who had unmade her when she tried to defy him. He had stayed his hand from killing, and instead he had twisted her mortal form into the travesty she now wore.

From her waist upwards she was as a woman, save with skin as pale as frost. Below she was a tremendous serpent, pearl-scaled and strong as iron. Utuzan, the Black Flame, had transformed her when she turned upon him, and now she bided her time. She awaited the night, she awaited the moment, and she believed it had come.

Lanterns always burned in her darkened chambers, day and night. She watched as the last light of day blazed down beyond her walls, sun setting in fire over the endless desert, and then the chill of night came creeping in on silent feet. She heard insects sing in her garden outside, frogs calling out in the waters of the pool, and she waited, for she knew her lover would soon arise.

Gladiator

Gladiator was one of those lightning-in-a-bottle movies where a bunch of shit that shouldn’t have worked came together and transformed the whole landscape of film in ways which are still evident today, two decades later. Director Ridley Scott had a good reputation, as the auteur behind movies like Alien and Blade Runner, but he hadn’t really had a hit in a long time, mostly turning out forgotten movies like Someone to Watch Over Me and Black Rain. Russell Crowe was clearly on his way up, after his breakout role in 1997’s LA Confidential, but would audiences buy him in a period piece like this one?

Further than that, it has to be remembered that the so-called “Sword & Sandal” genre had been out of fashion for literal decades by the year 2000. The big upswell of movies about ancient Greece and Rome had seen its heyday in the early 60s, and there had been almost nothing but TV movies and Masterpiece Theatre since then. As Crowe himself pointed out, for a very long time in Hollywood, if you were on-set in a toga, it meant you were doing a comedy. Nobody had attempted to approach historical drama about Rome with any kind of seriousness since the days of Spartacus and Cleopatra. It was an Old-Hollywood genre and nobody had seriously tried to revive it.

The film didn’t even begin with a completed script. There had been a treatment about the death of Emperor Commodus, who was drowned in his bath by his slave Narcissus (Crowe’s character was even called Narcissus in early drafts) but that was quickly expanded into what became a big, action-oriented movie filled with intrigue, treachery, and what were, at the time, almost unprecedented levels of violence.

Because a big change that Gladiator brought to Hollywood movies that can be seen even to this day was the elevation of action choreography as it pertained to swordfights and other close-up forms of combat. Fight scenes and stunts in the old Sword & Sandal films had been pretty primitive, and the blood in them kept to a low level so as not to offend censors of the day. With modern standards and modern effects, Scott was able to bring the fight scenes to a whole new level. The violence was visceral, bloody, and exciting in a way no one had ever seen before – not in depicting combat in the ancient world. The arena sequences in particular were absolutely electrifying, conveying what it must have been like to see such spectacles in the real Colosseum.

The effect on future movies was profound, as not only did Gladiator touch off a series of historical epics focused on Greece and Rome – Troy, 300, Alexander, Spartacus: Blood and Sand, and Rome among others – it also set a standard for action and excitement that other works had to deal with. You couldn’t just crap out something about the ancient world and call it a day, you had to at least try to stand up to Gladiator’s level of choreography and gore. Scott didn’t just make the Sword & Sandal epic viable again, he made it respectable. Gladiator didn’t feel cheap or silly, it took its subject matter deeply seriously, with a first-rate cast and what may be Hans Zimmer’s finest hour as a composer, creating a score that has been almost as influential as the movie itself.

And the history of Sword & Sorcery fiction is steeped in the ancient world, as it was a major area of fascination for writers from Howard to Mundy. Howard’s tales of the Picts only work with the backdrop of the Roman Empire to push against, and the opening battle in Gladiator is like something right out of one of his stories. Despite the brutality of battle, Scott does not shy from showing the exaltation of war, or the excitement in spite of the horror. The arena scenes range from ugly to grandiose, and yet they are never less than edge-of-your-seat thrilling.

Ancient Rome during the Empire is definitely a morally compromised world, and we see various characters struggling with that through the course of the film, trying to find a way to be moral in an amoral society that has become decadent and dangerous. Commodus stands as the avatar of that moral decay, and as such the symbolism becomes far too rich for Sword & Sorcery, even if the overarching theme of revenge is one that fits right in.

Gladiator is definitely not a Sword & Sorcery film, but it had a huge impact on action cinema in general, and infused a tremendous amount of blood and violence into the mainstream of Hollywood blockbusters. It affirmed that R-rated films could make money in an era of bland PG-13 fare, and it brought back a fascination with the Classical World that served as a major wellspring of inspiration for S&S authors old and new.