Hollywood Needs to Stop Making Terrible King Arthur Films
But they won’t, though.
I was going to start by reminding everyone how much we love medieval stories, tales where knights fight and struggle and sometimes succeed. But I’m not going to do that here — mostly because I kind of just did that — but also because, like Hollywood unfortunately does, I want to do things differently. That’s right. I’m choosing expression over entertainment, declaring them mutually exclusive, and then blaming you when my movie fails to fly. We all know they do this, too, but for some reason I have yet to divine, no one is really getting mad about it.
That’s mad as in angry, by the way, not the British mad that implies one’s crazy about something.
Well, since you’re not angry enough yet, consider this. Since 1981’s Excalibur, only 3 big Arthurian films have disgraced theaters near you: First Knight in 1995, King Arthur in 2004, and King Arthur: Legend of the Sword in 2017. That’s only 3 in 36 years. What’s that you say? “Quality is better than quantity.” Well, fictitious heckler, allow me to inform you of the reasons why you are mostly right.
Quality breeds quantity
You heard it here first, but you’ve seen it many a time. If something’s good, we usually want more of it, and with movies, that means sequels. John Boorman’s Excalibur was never really going to get a sequel, though. Despite being the best of the aforementioned Big 4 films, it had more problems with pacing than a smoker running a marathon, taking us from Uther to Arthur’s demise in less time than it took Will Smith to save the Erf on Independence Day. To be clear, that’s over 3 books worth of content in a little over 2 hours, a feat we shall hereafter refer to as a Reverse-Hobbit. Conflating a bunch of characters with nearbys was a problem, too. I mean, who can’t tell Morgana from Morgause? Not their mother Igraine who’s also mother of Elaine and barely in a frame. What a shame. It’s also shameful that the only knights who got screentime were Arthur, Lancelot, and Percival, when Gawain — played by Liam fricking Neeson — Arthur’s legal heir as eldest nephew, got treated like an extra with dialogue. But the music was great, the cinematography got an Oscar nod, and Nicol Williamson’s Merlin is the definitive version of the character, so at least the film will be remembered fondly.
That’s not the case for the next film, though.
That’s Not the Romance We Meant
What can I say about First Knight that hasn’t already been said about Twilight? Oh! Here we go. First Knight didn’t make any careers. Julia Ormond and Richard Gere were already stars, but you wouldn’t know from this film. Their chemistry is a slightly working baking soda volcano at best and tap water at worst. Sean Connery is in this film, too, phoning in his performance as the King of Knights like he‘s donating to PBS. I mean, I wouldn’t want to play an aging king who gets married to a much younger woman who doesn’t love me either, and that’s why I didn’t do it. Well, that and I hadn’t even started high school when this came out. The screenwriter clearly heard about the Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart and decided to adapt the book from hearsay, but the greatest crime he committed was actually trying to turn Lancelot’s greatest wrongdoing into a romance film by killing off Arthur and giving Lancelot — who is, in the film’s own canon, the newest knight and someone who was just charged with treason — control of Camelot. “You’re the man now, du Lac!” Get out of here with that. Easily the worst and probably cursed. Soldiering on.
But Why Soldiering Though?
Antoine Fuqua threw his hat into the inner ring of the Round Table in 2004 with King Arthur, a supposedly more historically accurate Arthurian film that saw the king and his knights as Roman soldiers. No, really. I didn’t just make that up. The man who gave us Training Day just 3 years prior decided we needed Arthur without Camelot. And, the worst part about making the protagonists soldiers is, unlike Jake Hoyt from Training Day, they don’t have mad squabbles. In fact, while the film only has sporadic squabbles before the last one, someone seems to die every single time. The godly Tristan? Dies in a duel on a battlefield after the villain tap dances around with the knight’s own sword. The unstoppable Lancelot? Fragged by a crossbow bolt as though Fuqua was getting revenge for the blunder of First Knight. I may have chortled while watching it. The cinematography was astounding, though. The music and most of the acting was superb, too, and if the names were changed to protect the innocent, I would have enjoyed this film thoroughly. In fact, were it not for it having a bare minimum of legendarium in it, I would have placed this adaptation above the next and final Arthurian movie on the list.
Robin Hood: Men in Camelot
How is King Arthur: the Legend of the Sword not a Robin Hood film? The main character is a crime lord with a band of misfits. The ruler of the land isn’t the real king. There’s a kind of heist on a castle. Heck, with the amount of money this film lost Warner Bros., King Arthur very literally robbed from the rich. Guy Ritchie was behind this mayhem, strangely, and if we were as visionary as he, we might have really gotten a whole franchise starring King Anarchy and the Mage — the female character’s actual name. Sadly, I couldn’t get into it like I wanted to. I didn’t recognize any of the knights from the stories, especially Sir Goosefat Bill of Littlefinger. I was put off by Vortigern, a guy who was old when Merlin was a fricking child, being the antagonist of the film. And, most of all, I didn’t care for Arthur being so mentally well off. His life is mostly tragedy, after all. Still, the music and effects when he wields Excalibur were brilliant and unforgettable, and Charlie Hunnam did bring a good bit of malice to the role that had heretofore been a bit lacking. However, after watching this film and seeing it fail to recoup its investment, I knew immediately that we’d have problems getting another mainline adaptation going.
But There’s Hope…
So, with 4 adaptations in 9 times as many years — far fewer than Eastern literature’s giant, Journey to the West (irony seen) — both quality and quantity seem to have been equally unimportant. But that’s not the full story. Between the years of 1981 and 2023, there have been a number of shows about the Arthurian legend…and only MOST of them are terrible. 1998’s two-part miniseries Merlin was spectacular, even though it focused on Merlin’s (played by Sam Neill) journey and had the Irish Queen Mab in the mix. 2001’s The Mists of Avalon focused on Morgan le Fay and was pretty good for being quite different from its source novel. The BBC Merlin series started in 2008 and made it all the way to 2012. That’s 5 seasons of one of the most entertaining Merlin-centric series out there. 65 episodes, too; so, it’s not the typical British 3 to 6-episode season (excuse me, series — they call seasons series there…I think). So, it can work. I mean, none of the above-mentioned shows are Game of Thrones-grade. They’re more of The Sword in the Stone your mother says you have at home, but people watched, and that means they’re interested. We just need a screenwriter and showrunner that knows the stories, knows they need to be told with more care than a movie has time to provide, and knows how to deliver greatness.
We won’t get it with this upcoming The Winter King show or the upcoming The Sword in the Stone live-action remake, though. But I’ll have to slay those beasties another day.
