Film Review

There is a great lesson to be learned from this rubbish film, I think. King Arthur, the latest film from uber-producer Jerry Bruckheimer (Independence Day, Pirates of the Caribbean) tells the 'real' stroy of King Arthur and his Knights of the Roundtable. Gone is the romance of knights on horseback, chivalry, medieval romance and intrigue. What we get instead is the Romans, the Woads and the Saxons and Arthur as Arturius, leader of an elite group of warriors consigned to duty in snowy and rainy Britain to aid the Romans in their imperialist expansion.

The film opens with a blurb about 'recent archealogical discoveries' influnecing this re-telling. Yeah, somebody dug up a copy of Gladiator and said "let's do this again...only not as good!" It is Hollywood's recent fascination with the Greeks and the Romans rather than history or archaology which seems to be at the heart of this remake.

Arthur, is now conflicted and sullen. He is surrounded by a group of fellow kinghts - only six actually, which makes the battle scenes even more ludicrous. What I found really disturbing was the plethora of British accents - Cockney (courtesy of Ray Winstone--doing his best gangster impersonation, only this time as a roman soldier on a horse in the dark ages!), West Country - any you could think of. Keira Knightley as Guinevere drew audible laughs from the audience I watched the film with: she may be many things but a warrior princess, and one who speaks like Princess Diana, isn't one of them and the outfits she wore - where did she manage to get them? I didn't know they had S+M shops back then.

Stripped of the myths surrounding Arthur which have built up over the centuries we are left with nothing but a battle movie. There's nothing particularly wrong with that, it's just that we've seen better recently (Gladator, Troy) and therein lies the lesson of this film I think. It's all very well to want to strip away the myth and get to the 'truth', the real facts. But what happens when you strip all that away and there is no story left to tell?

In the West we have turned from myth towards the literalfactual and sometimes that is not a good thing. Every once in a while the fairytale is enough - to tell of swords in stones, of wizards and courtly love and chivalry and knights at a round table and a king with a court like no other...