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.