King Arthur is being billed as the only version of Arthurian legend we've never seen, the true one. That is of course a silly claim as even the best current theories on who Arthur might have been are pretty vague. This movie is an attempt to take those new theories and turn them into an epic adventure. Hopefully someone else will attempt to tell this story because this version lies on the screen with about as much life as you'd expect from the actual Arthur after being dead for hundreds of years.
You don't have to look hard to find the culprit behind this turkey. David Franzoni's script leaves us with about a dozen half-baked characters and a sequence of events that is at best improbable and at worst uninvolving. King Arthur is a major mythological figure and any movie about him should make a point of establishing the character as a giant among men. Late in the film Arthur (Clive Owen) meets an opposing general for the first time and this general notes that after all the tales he heard of Arthur, he's unimpressed to find an ordinary man. My thoughts exactly. There is far too much talking about how great Arthur is instead of showing us how great he is. He's supposed to be a legend, someone who will inspire an entire nation to follow him. What we get is a solid guy, a good fighter, someone you definitely want in your army but nothing more.
Making things worse, the script treats most of the other characters even more shabbily. Arthur's knights are a mostly unremarkable lot. One or two were so weakly defined that I couldn't tell you their names. Gawain (Joel Edgerton) and Galahad (Hugh Dancy) are largely indistinguishable from one another. Lancelot (Ioan Gruffudd) seems to have the thankless job of constantly telling Arthur how much life sucks. Whining wasn't really an attribute I expected from a famous knight. Bors (Ray Winstone) manages to turn into something of a real character and is thus the only one I felt much of anything for. Guinevere (Keira Knightley) gets off to a promising start but spends the last half hour or so of the movie with virtually no dialogue, reduced to making menacing looks at the enemy. The character of Merlin is turned into a chieftain of a tribe known as the Woads. They refer to him as a sorcerer but he never does anything vaguely unusual.
If you ever watch the History Channel, you've probably come across a documentary or two about a current theory that the legend of Arthur is based on a real commander in the Dark Ages who pulled the Britons together and successfully repelled the Saxon invaders. The guess is that this commander was actually from the Roman army. The movie assumes that this was a Roman by the name of Lucius Artorius Castus, even though Castus lived about three centuries before the Battle of Badon Hill which serves as the film's climax. The movie has him commanding a Sarmatian cavalry unit, which probably was correct. It doesn't really matter, as the existence of a historical Arthur is highly debatable. The legends are more likely built on the exploits of numerous individuals. What the movie does right is recast these characters into the Dark Ages rather than the Middle Age. After that, historical accuracy becomes rather dubious.
The idea of the story is that Arthur and his Sarmatian knights are about to reach the end of their contracted service to the Roman army. After that they are free to return home. Unfortunately, the bishop who arrives to deliver their papers orders them on a last mission before retiring. They must head deep into Woad territory to rescue a Roman family who are important to the Pope. The bishop also tells them that Rome is pulling out because Britain is more trouble than it's worth and oh, by the way, the Saxons are invading. The knights are a little pissed off about this but because they tell us how great Arthur is, they decide to follow him on this last mission.
They rescue the family, rescuing Guinevere in the process. Arthur knows the Saxons are near so he clears out all the locals and retreats for safety. The Saxons track them down as they attempt to cross a frozen lake. The battle scene on the ice is clearly the movie's high point. If the rest of the movie had been this clever and well executed, I might be giving a good review. Surviving the battle, Arthur returns to the Roman outpost where he decides not to go home to Rome but instead stay and fight the Saxons.
Director Antoine Fuqua has shown a real visual flair and a slick technical approach to his films. This seems to be a project that got away from him. The look of the film is permanently gray and dreary. Most of the battle sequences are shot too closely and edited too rapidly to deliver coherence. Considering how weak most of the characters are, Fuqua would have been better served by hiring trained fighters for most of the roles. Instead, he has to train actors to fight and then shoots them in close-up to mask their inexperience. The result is combat that becomes a blur of images without forming a story. The bar for this type of combat was set earlier in the year by the riveting fight between Hector and Achilles in Troy. At no point does King Arthur ever approach that level of quality.
I don't want to lay much blame on the actors for this mess. You can see they are trying their best but the script simply fails to give them much to work with. Clive Owen remains a good actor awaiting a good project to make him a star. Sadly, he's mostly known for those nifty BMW short films from a few years back. Keira Knightley is the hot rising talent but this will likely be the first movie to leave off her resume. Stellan Skarsgård is a fine actor who plays the Saxon general Cerdic. That character is so shabbily written that I didn't even know his name was Cerdic until I looked it up while writing this review. The whole group deserved better than this.
I had high hopes for this movie, as I'm something of a history junkie. The idea that archeologists were starting to develop the basis for a historical Arthur was endlessly fascinating to me. So a movie based on that research seemed like a great idea. I still think it's a great idea. It's just not a great movie, or even a good one.
- John Shea
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