I’ll Be In My Trailer: King Arthur and the Legend of the Brown Note

I review movies before they are released, based entirely on their trailers. I’m just making most of this stuff up, so don’t expect an accurate review here.

Filmmakers have been plundering Arthurian legend for material since at least the early 1900s. After over 100 years of King Arthur movies, creating a unique and interesting property in that genre is certainly a challenge.

Guy Ritchie’s upcoming film, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, rises to this challenge by mixing in a mythology that has been virtually ignored by Hollywood. I’m talking of course about the the mythical sound, known in legend as the Brown Note, that causes those who hear it to involuntarily defecate.

That look when your bowels are about to be destroyed.

The film opens with the Brown Note chasing Arthur and company through the slums of Camelot. They jump into a river to avoid embarrassment over their soiled hosen and narrowly escape. Now Arthur must find a way to defeat this mysterious enemy before his kingdom craps itself to death. To make matters worse, his defecation was so extreme that it caused Arthur to lose his memory. He had literally crapped his brains out.

Oh man, I must have been so wasted last night. Who are you again?

While Arthur struggles to regain his memories and tries to figure out who is controlling this malevolent sound, the streets of Camelot begin to run brown. Crops are ruined by fecal contamination from the peasant farm workers. Guardsmen are unable to maintain law and order because they are constantly soiling their armor.

Bowels exploding from the stomach: either the work of the Brown Note or perhaps a medieval version of Taco Bell.

The genius of this film is that it explores a mythology that has clearly been in Hollywood’s subconscious for years. Various version of the Brown Note have featured prominently in many movie trailers, but The Legend of the Sword is the first film to actually explore the sound’s origin in any depth.

Arthur is just covered in new mythology.

Some may dislike the wild departure from traditional Arthurian legend, but I found the intermingling of disparate mythologies brought new life into an old genre. It also created a fascinating antagonist. The Brown Note has no visible form. Its presence is only revealed by the sound itself, which is reminiscent of a constipated foghorn. It has no clear motive because, well it’s just a sound wave. This keeps the characters, and the viewers, on their toes trying to guess when and where the terrible noise will echo next.

That’s not mud…

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is a solid entry in a thick catalog of Arthurian films. I expect it to be in contention for best original screenplay at the Academy Awards and if it does not at least win for best sound mixing, then the Oscars will have lost all credibility with this reviewer.

Originally published at www.thatsnotcurrent.com on September 27, 2016.