Movies about King Arthur

[God-Emperor of Mankind]

Originally posted by Rustynail@Dec 26 2004, 06:04 AM
King Arthur originally was made to be a dark and gritty movie rated R from the beginning, mid production the producers told the director to make it pg-13 so they could release it for a younger audience and earlier. The directer himself said that the story line suffered along with his passion for making the film. They told him he could release an R version directors cut, but by then the damage was done. I wonder what would have been different if he would have been left alone.

Thomas

Considering what an improvement the DC was I wonder the same.
The alternate ending was better then the one they kept.
Damn you Bruckheimer. *viking*

Oh, and remember when one of Arthur's knights fired an arrow into the air, which sailed over a wall and killed the traitor hiding in the tree-- when he could have had NO PRIOR KNOWLEDGE of his presence? Hell, he'd never even met the guy!

Well, Tristan was standing on that hill a good while so he could have spotted something moving in the tree.
Of course this you have to assume this.
It would have been better if they would have just made a shot of the traitor moving a branch or something so you don't have to assume.

King arthur has a high rating for me then Excalibur IMO.
The musical score for King arthur is just awesome.

[Carolus XII]

There is a version of the King Arthur myth made in the early/mid 1950s called "MGM's Knights Of The Round Table". It stars Robert Taylor as Lancelot, Ava Gardner as Guenivere, Mel Ferer as Arthur, and Stanley Baker as Modred. It is in glorious technicolor, and may be one of the most visually colorful movies ever made. It has strange childlike feel to it, and yet is loaded with swordplay and battles. It is (to me) THE King Arthur Movie. I know it is available on VHS tape (DVD?), and it is a staple on the TCM (Turner Classic Movies) channel. Seek it out.

[Valus]

I thought that Stellan Skarsgård did an excellent job as the saxon king, he certainly have the looks for it.
And the man who plays Bors, Ray Winstone, is the coolest of the lot perhaps challenged by Tristian.

[matthew the black prince]

i agree,i loved the saxon king and his badassedness,and i was glad to see real britons rather than people overed in plate armor like in the books

[Sidus Preclarum]

Originally posted by matthew the black prince@Jan 9 2005, 09:11 PM
i agree,i loved the saxon king and his badassedness,and i was glad to see real britons rather than people overed in plate armor like in the books

what books ? granted, Chretien's book, the vulgate Lancelot, Malory's book, ie the books written in the middle age were all writen with the chivalric ideals in mind, and protagonists are described as men of the writer's time . They are the main corpus on which the Arthurian "universe" is based, they are the classics .
On the other hand, there exist modern renditions of such an "historical" Arthur : read this for exemple : the battles are small scales engagement, that smell of blood, sweat and fear . No white walled camelot here, cities smell of pig ****** .
But to render the spirit and athmosphere of the "plate armoured" version Arthur, Excalibur reigns supreme ...

[the Black Prince]

yeah, the warlord chronicles are by the best arthurian books i;ve ever read, though even he was forced to put in a few anachronisms for the sake of his readers... names like Lancelot (launcelot) gawain and in some ways possibly even arthur himself just don't seem true to the age...


but most other books yo read on king arthur focus on the traditional victorianised version of the medieval arthurian legend, and this goes down from adults literature through to the works by childrens authors like Roger Lancelyn Green and Rosemary Sutcliffe, all of whom expound the plate armour and camelot version of arthur

[Rush Limbaugh]

Is there any doubt Excalibur is the best. The Robert Taylor one is great also great though. The best book I ever read on it was the Dragon King. In it Merlin and his ilk are from another planet and Arthur is not the benoevolent man we read in most versions. A truly unique view of the tale.

[Lord Tomyris]

I've seen one series where Merlin is from Atlantis...not quite another planet though! :

[Time Commander Bob]

A lot of "King Arthur" books or flims tend to be a inseperable mixture of fact, myth, legend and stuff that's made up to make it more interesting. A monk in the Dark Ages said that Arthur killed 960 Saxons-on his own- at a battle with the cross of Jesus Christ on his back!(of course this isn't true)

[Trax]

Is there a directors cut of the latest Arthur movie and if there is is it any better then the theatrical version?

[God-Emperor of Mankind]

Originally posted by Trax@Jan 14 2005, 04:29 PM
Is there a directors cut of the latest Arthur movie and if there is is it any better then the theatrical version?

Yes, it is 15 minutes longer and all blood and gore effect has been put back in.
and yes it is a better version.

[Oldgamer]

Originally posted by Gadger@Oct 9 2004, 06:47 PM
You forgot Monty Python's Holy Grail :

Run away! Run away! :

[ThiudareiksGunthigg]

IMO, no-one has made a decent Arthur movie yet. I used to think Excalibur was the most over-rated crappy Arthur film ever made, but the recent effort was so jaw-droppingly bad Boorman's version looks like Nobel Prize winning material by comparison.

Here's a review from another board which summarises King Arthur nicely:

There’s a reason the Arthur legends have been a favourite of western folklore for the last 1500 years – they are cracking good stories. The stuff about Arthur’s birth, his sudden emergence from obscurity, his gallant defence of his homelands by driving back the tides of barbarism, the Arthur/Lancelot/Guinevere triangle, adultery, incest and finally Arthur killing his own son: it’s all classic folkloric stuff.

Given that, if there was an Arthur, he probably lived in the late Fifth Century and given that there is already a small publishing sub-industry centred on semi-fantasy/historical retellings of the Arthurian legends in novel form, the idea of doing the same in a film has a lot of merit and potential. The problem is, if you are going to set the story in the 400s and also strip it of almost all the stuff that actually makes the legends cracking good yarns, you need to replace the cracking good yarns with … well … some other cracking good yarn.

This movie blunders ponderously around, spectacularly failing to do anything close to this.

Basically, for all the booming music, buckling of swash, glowering heroes and hissing villains, there is really no reason to get worked up about anything that’s going on.

After a muddled introduction that informs us that historians and archaeologists now agree who Arthur really was (they do?&#33, we’re introduced to the idea that Arthur’s men are actually Sarmatians from the Ukrainian steppes. Far from nobly defending their British homelands from the encroaching Saxons, these ‘knights’ can’t wait to see the back of the dismal place and get back to their tents on the plains a couple of thousand miles to the east.

One day from finishing their fifteen year enforced tour of duty, they are ordered by a slimy bishop to go on a last mission. They have to ride north of Hadrian’s Wall into enemy (‘Woad’! *laughs lots*) territory to rescue some Romans. Artorius/Arthur responds to this with some glowering silences, which isn’t surprising because he responds to just about everything in the movie with a bit of glowering – fear, surprise, disappointment, battle, hot sex with Keira Knightly, you name it. His hairy Conan-esque biker mates respond by throwing things and getting drunk.

Anyway, off ride Arthur and his six (only six?) ‘knights’, crossing the Wall and the frontier. At this point one of my non-history obsessive viewing companions asked why this important Roman had built his country house several days ride outside the frontiers of the Empire. A fair and highly logical question, but one the screenplay writer seems to have forgotten to ask himself.

On getting to this inexplicably misplaced estate, Arthur finds that this Roman isn’t a great guy. He also finds (as if the slimy bishop and his last 15 years of service wasn’t a give-away) that the Empire isn’t so hot either. They killed a mate of his in Rome and are now abandoning Britain to the Saxons.

On top of this he finds a walled up dungeon and inside finds wicked monks (‘wicked’ = ugly with funny voices) torturing the noble pagan ‘Woads’ (Woads! **laughs and slaps knee vigorously**). There they find ‘Woad’ hottie Guinevere and the ubiquitous Hollywood cute-but-brave kiddie who tell him that they were being tortured to tell the wicked monks things that weren’t true, or something.

At this point one of my other non-history obsessive companions asked what the point of this torture and interrogation was, since both the evil monks and the ‘Woads’ were permanently walled into the dungeon to die together. Something else the screenplay writer didn’t think through.

Arthur woos Guinevere by means of some glowering and resetting her dislocated fingers. He clearly does a good job of both because he is rewarded with some bonking and she is able to handle a bow with Legolas-style skill within hours.

Around this point the writer seems to have remembered that he was supposed to be adapting the Arthur legends. So he has his Sarmatian Lancelot do a bit of half-hearted sleazing onto Woadevere (as close as we get to the love triangle) and there’s a flashback about Arthur’s dead dad and something about kiddie-Arthur being unable to pull his sword out of Dad’s burial mound (‘The Sword in the Loose Dirt’ as opposed to ‘The Sword in the Stone’ – doesn’t have quite the same ring to it though).

By this stage our muddled and unenthusiastic heroes find the land of the Woadies is being attacked by Saxons from over the sea. These guys, who look like Norwegian heavy metal fans, are bad because they kill civilians and burn things. Arthur decides to stay and fight and - despite the fact he’s not exactly inspiring, the land isn’t theirs and they aren’t bonking Keira Knightly - the Conan-esque ‘knights’ decide to stay too.

At this point one of my non-history obsessive mates asked why the Saxons were sailing from northern Germany, bypassing the whole of the rest of Britain and attacking Scotland. An odd detour, especially since we’ve just been told the Romans were abandoning the whole province.

Anyway, Artie, Woadivere and the Ukranian biker-‘knights’ then confront the heavy metal Saxons on a frozen lake. The Saxons prove their stupidity by attacking across an ice sheet which is cracking under their feet and (quelle surprise) all fall in the water and drown. This may also explain how they sailed to attack southern Britain and ended up somewhere near Aberdeen – they were either really drunk, really dumb or both.

Then lots of fighting happens, complete with ‘jerkycam’ shots, smoke, flaming arrows, exploding Roman napalm, more smoke, grunting heavy metal dudes and Romano-bikers and, of course, glowering.

At one point in the ‘Making of …’ featurettes on the DVD, Miss Knightly informs us chirpily that it’s ‘a historical fact’ that women (‘Woad’ women?) fought in battle. Now far be it from me to doubt a single word that comes from Kiera’s perfectly formed lips, but I kind of wonder if she has been correctly informed on this point. Even if she’s right, several of my companions wondered if the plaited leather bondage bikinis she and the other Woadazons wear in battle are (a) likely to be terribly protective or (b) appropriate clothing for Scotland. No wonder they were all blue.

Anyway, the hissing Saxon bad guy dies in a big fight and Arthur, the bikers and the Woad-hippies win. Then Arthur and Woadivere get married in a New Age wedding ceremony presided over by Hippy Merlin amongst some polystyrene standing stones.

All in all, it is ‘Much Ado About Not Much’, sprinkled with illogic, ponderous dialogue and bombastic music.

The movie plucks the legends from their usual context and plonks them in the Fifth Century. But it’s not the actual Fifth Century (which would have been interesting and original) it’s a fantasy Fifth Century which is much like the never-never land of the original legends, except wetter and dirtier. So what was the point?

In doing so the story is stripped of everything which makes the legends enduring and legendary and replaced with a succession by-the-numbers Hollywood ‘epic’ plot clichés. Arthur isn’t very inspiring or even interesting. In fact, most of the time he doesn’t even seem all that interested in proceedings himself. The ‘knights’ spend half their time not knowing who or what they are fighting for and the brief declarations about ‘freedom’ and ‘honour’ never seem to convince anyone much.

Any good points? Well, Keira Knightly is very, very, very pretty. No honestly, she really is.

[sabaku_no_gaara]

from what site did you get this review?

[Ezmartini]

That was freakin' hilarious.

[adelinser]

You know ThiudareiksGunthigg, most successful films are bulit on the same premise. Look at Star Wars. Young man rises from obscurity and squalor ( borrowed from RTW) to rise to greatness. Although he did not have to continually destroy the population of Aldaron just to gain donari and make the people happy. Show me a successful film that doesn't meet this criteria? Million Dollar Baby? The end may be diffferent but it is always the struggle to overcome and become greater than oneself. Welcome to hollywood formula. To bad so many idiot writers still don't get it. Please refer to this link.
http://www.compfused.com/directlink/516/

[ThiudareiksGunthigg]

Originally posted by sabaku_no_gaara@Mar 7 2005, 07:58 PM
from what site did you get this review?

Ummm, I wrote that review. And posted it on another board I frequent.

That was freakin' hilarious.

Glad you enjoyed it.

[Goomba]

A better question...

How can you make a good king arthur movie?

[Borat]

I did see King Arthur (2004) and it wasen't that bad i can tell you, but i havent seen that much other movies about him.

[Ardeur]

I'm in the crowd that has yet to see a good Arthur flick. However, I have heard that the Camelot musical with Richard Harris is a classic piece of work.

I'll stick with the books. There's just too much detail there for some Hollywood schmuck to do it right.