Nerds That Geek Movie Review - 'King Arthur: Legend of the Sword'

Written by Mike Cervantes

THIS IS THE EMERGENCY SPOILER ALERT SYSTEM...YOU ARE ADVISED TO READ AT YOUR OWN RISK...

It’s always hard to come up with clever things to say about films based on pre-modern literature. It’s a great well of inspiration for many authors/directors to draw from, sure, but the stories themselves lend towards a narrative that is simple as can possibly be. My mind often goes to the 2007 film adaptation of Beowulf, based on an ancient narrative that goes 'man slays monster,' followed by 'man slays MOTHER of monster,' and ends with 'man is slain by dragon.' In order to modernize this, Director Robert Zemeckis effectively needed to take a third of the narrative and suggest that Beowulf made that part up, just so he could sew in a few veins of character motivation, depth, and transition into the piece.

The mythical life and adventures of King Arthur actually has tons of interesting themes that are capable of sustaining it: Arthur pulling the sword from the stone, his tutelage under the wizard Merlin, his marriage to Lady Guinevere and her subsequent affair with Sir Lancelot, the quest for the Holy Grail, his rivalry with his sorceress half-sister Morgan Le Fay, and his inevitable death during a war against the armies of Mordred. Like the telling of legends themselves, though, it is up to the maker of a film based on these legends to take a few of the most juicy bits, concoct a decent-length film out of them, and see how their results play out before a screen-going audience. It is funny that for all of the sheer Arthurian legend that exists on paper, we’ve really only seen about three successful film contributions, the first is a 1967 film based on a musical, the second is a late-era Walt Disney film, and the third is a lengthy surrealistic skit by a little known comedy group called Monty Python.

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword makes it pretty well known from the start that it isn’t going to be tackling its subject matter with any attention towards its lofty lore. At the very start of the film, the Warner Bros. logo glows with red runes as though it is pleading with its audience to pretend this is actually Lord of the Rings, followed by a preamble text suggesting an endless and possibly sequel-bound war between man and mage. We then get our first glimpse at a scene that we’ll soon see replayed multiple times in intervals throughout the film: in the middle of a battle where the evil mage Mordred is using King Kong-sized CG elephants to flatten Camelot, Uther (Eric Bana) sends his son Arthur away on a raft, in a manner not-unlike Superman, while his totally-a-traitor brother Vortigern (Jude Law) undergoes a mysterious ritual to seize the last bit of the Camelot throne. In the madness Arthur’s mother (Katie McGrath) is killed, Uther is turned to stone with the magic sword Excalibur imbedded in his back, and Arthur sails downstream.

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This begins the first of many head-scratching montages that the film seems to love to toss at the audience out of nowhere. It’s somewhat hard to describe in text but it’s just 3 solid minutes of a second-by-second smash-cut of Arthur living the hard-knock life as the orphan ward of prostitutes, doing odd jobs, taking punches, and stealing purses until he becomes an adult, played by Charlie Hunnam, and the sole master of the economy in the unnamed suburb of Camelot he lives in. The movie shifts from King Arthur to Robin Hood, at this point, as Arthur and his captains Tristan (Kingsley Ben-Adir) and Backlack (Neil Maskell) outwit the evil Sherriff Kjartan (Mikael Petersbrant), leading Arthur to be arrested and led to a labor camp. There, he successfully pulls Excalibur from the stone, and immediately gets set up by his evil uncle to be decapitated. He is then saved by a combination of his two friends, who happen to be spectacular archers, and a society of rebels led by Sir Bedivere (Djimon Hounsou) and a perpetually unnamed female substitute for Merlin (Astred Berges-Frisbey).
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So, the main narrative is now concerned with Arthur being the chosen one, the true-blood king, destined to destroy Vortigern’s evil reign. It’s strange, then, that the rest of the film tends to play out like a medieval Ocean’s Eleven, as this rag-tag band of rebels use the power of rapid smash-cuts to outsmart Kjartan’s men, and pull various jobs in order to erode the public’s belief in Vortigern. The editing at this point in the film becomes so erratic that it’s difficult to tell whether it was director Guy Ritchie’s choice to play out multiple scenes, 3 seconds at a time, to paint the whole movie, or if this film was originally longer, and the smash-cuts are a way of preserving as many scenes as possible while maintaining a short runtime. Whatever the reason was, it largely distracts from a film that admittedly looks very good for the periods when the plot isn’t swarming around your head like a cluster of angry hornets. There’s an especially well-shot sequence when, after the villains succeed in taking a minor victory form Arthur, he throws Excalibur into the river and runs into The Lady of The Lake for the first time, and that final climactic battle Arthur has with Vortigern that is supplied nicely with both CG and a decent closure to the overall plot. Other than that, though, there isn’t a point in this film when two scenes are not happening all at once, and the rapid-fire progression of the themes in this film are more dizzying than the potential 3-D viewing experience.

It’s a real shame. Warner Bros. really could have had a franchise with this film. The cast is likeable enough, the storyline is daring and roguish, and the effects are wonderful. If it weren’t for the slap-dash editing, a lot of people could have walked away with a greater appreciation for the filmed Arthurian legend. As it is, there’s no point in expecting that both King Arthur and Guy Ritchie are going to be free agent commodities in Hollywood for the foreseeable future. 

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