Jerry Bruckheimer's King Arthur

There's nothing worse, I'm afraid, than a bad movie that isn't amusing when you watch it ironically. Earlier this week, Susan and I saw Jerry Bruckheimer's King Arthur; the movie unintentionally provided us with a few laughs, a couple scenes were almost okay, and the fight scenes were decent, but the movie overall didn't offer much that you couldn't get from the preview. Some thoughts:

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• If the whole academic thing doesn't work out, maybe I'll become a historical consultant to movies. I'll bet the consultant listed in the movie's credits was paid pretty well (at least by the standards of academic historians); given the movie's many inaccuracies, I can't imagine that he had much to do. Sounds like a dream job to me!
  
• One of the silliest "historical" details in the movie was the film-makers' decision to make King Arthur a Pelagian. Anyone who knows about Pelagius will find this choice kind of odd. Anyone who doesn't will find it confusing and meaningless. So is it really going to make anyone happy?
  
• I really pity whoever it was who decided that the Knights of the Round Table were really a band of Sarmatian warriors drafted into the Roman army. When the movie begins, the Romans claim a young Lancelot from his Sarmatian family; I wish they'd included a scene in which Sarmatian children mocked Lancelot for his girly, French-sounding name. That alone would have made the movie worth seeing!
  
• A word of advice to people who make movies: if the character who speaks the opening narration dies during the movie, it doesn't make sense for him to read the closing narration as well. (Other people can debate the knotty philosophical question of whether it makes sense for the man who reads the opening narration to die during the movie...)
  
• Is there any mythological basis in history for the belief (stated at the start of the movie) that horses are the reincarnation of dead heroes?
  
• This movie had the disturbing tendency to make likeable actors extremely bland. For a while, I kind of liked Clive Owen (Arthur), but there was no range in his performance and it got kind of boring watching him; I've kind of liked Keira Knightley in other movies, but I've never been convinced that she could act. Here she seemed really unconvincing repeating lines like "They tortured me... with machines!", though I was amused to see her in blue Pictish paint.
  
• Why did the evil Saxon bad guy (don't ask) have a Texas accent? Why did his son have an accent that sounded Russian by way of Denmark?
  

I still can't decide which movie was worse--King Arthur or Troy. At least Troy was more fun to write about...

Troy and King Arthur are very similar movies, I'd argue: each is an unsuccessful attempt to demythologize (and perhaps historicize) a series of events from legend. I never understood critics who claimed that Troy's producers showed their lack of seriousness when they decided to leave out the Olympian gods; as Mary Renault showed, it's possible to write intellectually sophisticated narratives that attempt to portray ancient legends in historically plausible terms. Similarly, I don't think that movie adaptations of famous legends and myths should necessarily be criticized for every departure from the original story, as long as they remain true to the spirit of their source.

Nevertheless, Troy and King Arthur are impossible to take seriously because they make two crucial mistakes: any attempt to historicize myths and legends has to be appealing on both a historical and a human level, but neither movie seems to realize this. First, neither film seems concerned with the world it's describing or interested in historical plausibility. The film-makers' decision to give the Knights of the Round Table a Sarmatian background seems completely random, for example--I suspect that Jerry Bruckheimer was just desperate to come up with a rationale for yet another Camelot movie. (Compare the world of King Arthur to the carefully realized world of Mary Renault's novels; any plausible attempt to reimagine an ancient level will be as concerned with the world it's describing as it is with the characters we already know.) Second, and just as importantly, both movies depend on viewers' knowledge of the source material: you have to take it on faith that Achilles and Arthur are great warriors before you see the movie, for instance. Ioan Gryffyd's Lancelot is likeable enough, but he's completely forgetable; without the backstory from Arthurian legend, he's just not interesting. To be successful, however, a demythologized adaptation of a legend has to be compelling in its own right. You have to believe that familiar legends could develop from the story as told by the movie--whose makers are cheating if they appeal to viewers' knowledge of myth and legend.

Posted by Ed at July 18, 2004 03:04 PM