Heart of the Night

 

Utuzan went alone into the western desert, and a flame went before him to light his way.  He left the fortress of Hamun at the setting of the moon, and no one saw him, for he moved as one with the night.  Once he was away from the works of man, among the rocks and the sand, he held up the ancient jewel called the Heart of Anatu and he called forth a light from within it.

He studied the indecipherable carvings upon the translucent red stone, uncut and rough.  Even he did not know where it came from, or who had marked it.  In his long-ago age it had been a forbidden thing, a relic of an ancient goddess who the people of the empire did not revere.  Only he had dared to take it up, only he had dared to use it, and it had always given him strength, always been his ally.  Now, it was faded from what it had been, and his power seemed to fade with it.

Since his poisoning he had been weakened.  He still knew all his secrets and mysteries – the names of wind and fire, the conjuring of spirits from outside time and light.  It was his innate power that had been sapped, and he at last had come to understand that the heart had spent too much strength to preserve him.  Its power was finite after all, and now it was dying.  It grieved him, as the loss of a friend, for without it he would be very alone in this fallen age.

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword

Every so often, Hollywood decides to try another King Arthur adaptation, and it seems like they just keep getting worse, because this is one of the most grandly, flagrantly bad versions I have ever seen. Oh, I am sure there have been worse ones, since the Arthurian legends have been done so many times, but how often does a movie studio decide to launch $175+ million at a project so completely misguided? A movie where every narrative decision prompts another chorus of what were they thinking?

Ever since he married Madonna, Guy Ritchie has been making questionable decisions, but a run of success with his Sherlock Holmes movies got some people thinking he was a great director, despite there being little evidence that he is anything but a competent cinematographer. Anyway, apparently 3 or 4 King Arthur scripts were Frankensteined together to make this horror, and it shows in the almost complete lack of any kind of tonal consistency. This is a movie that doesn’t know whether it is a high fantasy, a gritty crime thriller, a political allegory, or a jaunty action-adventure, instead just deciding to shift gears whenever it feels like it.

The problem with shoehorning the Arthurian tale into one movie is that the real villain is Mordred, who is Arthur’s son and thus shows up way too late to serve as a foil for an origin story. This movie “solves” the problem by making the bad guy Uther’s evil brother Vortigern, who is played by Jude Law doing his oily, charming villain thing. He does a good job with the role, but Vortigern is so obviously evil and treacherous that it makes Uther (Eric Bana in a part so small it’s basically a cameo) look like a complete idiot for trusting him even a little bit.

The opening of the movie sets the stage by showing what the whole rest of the movie will be like: it looks awesome, it doesn’t make any sense, and it’s about as Arthurian as World of Warcraft. Less, maybe. The prologue explains how humans “lived in peace” with “the Mages” until the “Mage Sorcerer King Mordred” started some shit. And so you get a massive assault on Camelot by elephants that make the Oliphants from Return of the King look like pygmies. They come shambling in, entire fortresses on their backs, crushing everything in their path. It looks freaking amazing, but it is such a complete butchery of the legends as well as anything resembling history, that I am not sure what it is supposed to accomplish.

It gets even crazier from there, with Vortigern sacrificing his wife to a trio of tentacled siren/witches (who are never explained) that live in pools under Camelot (also never explained) and they help him overthrow Uther by turning him into a towering, armored, Grim Reaper dude who looks almost exactly like Frazetta’s Death Dealer and wields a ridiculous double-ended scythe. He kills Uther and Igraine, and little Arthur floats down what is apparently supposed to be the Thames to “Londinium”, where he is taken in and raised by whores in a bordello.

If you already have a lot of questions, well, neither I nor the movie have much in the way of answers for you. Part of the problem reviewing this movie is the fact that it would take a 10,000-word essay to unpack all of the stupid shit going on here. Do I talk about how Uther, before dying, throws Excalibur in the air and lets it impale him, and then he turns to stone and sinks to the bottom of the lake? Do I discuss how we keep talking about “Mages” as a separate race, despite that having no correspondence in the legends? Do we talk about how Arthur learns to fight from an Asian guy who has a martial arts dojo in “Londinium” and that said guy is called “Kung Fu George”?

It’s just so painful, the moreso because the cast is generally pretty good, and the movie is filled with images and scenes that actually work and have some resonance to them. The problem is that most of the scenes don’t seem to have much to do with each other, and so they don’t build to make something greater, they just pass by and are over and then something completely different starts. There are too many elements that go nowhere or are so bizarre they need explanations which never come. Ritchie makes some good sequences, but he can’t make this mess into something coherent, and he doesn’t seem interested in trying.

And this movie is a complete failure as an adaptation because it shows no desire to respect the myths it is supposed to be based on. The characters from the legends are nothing like their onscreen counterparts, and there is no attempt to make this feel like an Arthurian piece, rather they just slap a bunch of names on things and call it done. If this had been a fantasy unconnected to anything, it would actually have been better, because it has some cool elements and ideas, but they needed developing. This could have made a fine Sword & Sorcery movie if the creators had been able to make up their minds about what the hell they were trying to do, and cut out all the extraneous shit that didn’t need to be there. The only consolation in the whole mess is that the idiots who screwed it up lost a shit-ton of money, and the five planned sequels will thankfully never be made.

The Killing Dark

Arsinue felt the sun dying, even through the stone walls of her crypt. By day she slept here, shielded from all light, her limbs heavy with a languor she could not resist, but when the day waned she woke and lay here in silence and cold, waiting for the night, all but unable to move. Alone, she seethed with the anger in her, with the will that sustained her now, beyond the gate of death.

In the beginning she had denied that her brother’s traitor poison had done its work, and that she had survived, but now she knew she had not. Now she knew that her spirit had passed through the barrier into the Fields of the Dead, and yet she was not dead. She walked and breathed and spoke and hungered. Hers was a living death, and at first she had dwelled in terror of what she had become. Now she knew she had been given the power to revenge herself and to fight for her kingdom.

The sun vanished below the horizon, and it was as though she felt a coolness come over her stone tomb. She thrust her hands up, suddenly alive with purpose, and she pushed aside the great lid of the sarcophagus in which she slumbered during the daylight hours. She rose up naked in the torchlit dark of this deep place, and she heard the soft chanting of the priests of Anatu. This hidden temple was the only place she had found refuge, and from here she stretched forth her hand to take back the power that had been stolen from her.