Comments on: King Arthur (2004)

By: cinematophiliac

cinematophiliac — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 03:54:02 +0000

Better to be a wet crap, than to never have been a crap at all!

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 03:19:29 +0000

Pshaw, whatever. The fact remains that King Arthur is a piece of wet crap and isn't worth a tinker's shit compared to John Boorman's great (if admittedly plodding) Excalibur. Now there's an Arthur film. Also, hellz yeah for bringing back Rome. Keep the dream alive!

By: cinematophiliac

cinematophiliac — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 21:39:24 +0000

That’s the worst kind of death, you know!

By: Mark B.

Mark B. — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 19:54:03 +0000

They die until they’re dead? This is why Cinematophiliac is my favorite movie blog.

By: cinematophiliac

cinematophiliac — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 15:06:44 +0000

The thing is that the basic fundamentals of the Arthurian legend grew up in a lot of different cultures: in France (see Chretien de Trois), in Briton (see Thomas Malory and the old stanzic poems), I believe even in Germany, etc. But Fuqua still injected the typical parts of the “traditional” literary traditions, like the sword in the stone, the trifecta of love, etc. I’m sure there are accuracies in his presentation of the clans, etc. But all I’m saying is that he included those “expected” elements from Arthuriana in there but at the same time also shat on them, and that makes things unbelievable. I mean, there are so many variations on the stories that making one “enduring and true” narrative would be impossible, though we’ve come to expect a particular narrative with Arthur because they’re also found in the literary tradition. If Fuqua really wanted to go from another and “truer” and historically accurate angle, he shouldn’t have injected those expected literary elements because they conflicted in the film. All I’m saying is don’t have Lancelot flirting with Guinevere if you’re only going to have him die before their romance blossoms. Lancelot, in many tales, goes on to live to be a very old man. And Gawain has many adventures, gets married, etc. I read a lot of these tales in a class devoted entirely to the Arthuriana, by the way. I’m not saying I’m an expert, but I’m also not a dilettante.

I think all directors who are making quasi-historical films are going to try to justify their actions with “history.” But that doesn’t mean that their film reflects the collective consciousness of how we have interpreted history for centuries based on the literary tradition. One of the things that bothers me about these “historical” films is that when people see them, they assume that’s how it actually happened, because why would a director make an historical-like film and NOT make it accurate? Especially when they get the actors to talk it up? That’s just to get people to watch it and suspend their disbelief more. Troy is case and point. But now the story of the fall of Troy has entered the collective consciousness through the masses’ gulliblility when watching the film Troy, and not because they’ve actually read the Iliad or other classical Greek tales and histories.

That’s basically my point about the film King Arthur. If we read the literary tradition and we watch the various filmed interpretations, then we can at least have a better understanding of accuracy and inaccuracy. Fuqua, while trying to make a more historically accurate film, has also butchered the literary tradition. Now, which one is more correct, we’ll never know. I’m going with the literary tradition since my background is literature, not history.

By: ellen

ellen — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 02:56:03 +0000

WAIT! You’re in the wrong tradition.

The story isn’t based on the Arthurian legend we all know, with the round table and all, but on historically accurate stories of the clan wars and the reign of the warrior kings in Ireland. It’s these stories they think the Arthurian legends grew out of.

So, what Fuqua did in this movie was take those legends and provide a more historically-rooted reinterpretation of how things would have logically worked out, minus the mythical Camelot and Merlin and dragons. Okay, I don’t actually know if there were dragons in the Arthurian legends, but I know that it’s about as historically accurate as if there were.

This was actually something that left both critics and audiences confused when the film first came out and people expected the familiar Sword in the Stone story. This sort of made a lot of nerds unhappy when the film first came out, but Keira Knightley did a ton of press for the film talking about how she was pleased to be playing a character who was based on the ways we know women were treated in the warrior clans native to the U.K. and Ireland. Although, historically speaking, Guinevere probably would have been offered in marriage to Arthur as part of the agreement for teaming up with her clan.