Mix up centuries, politics, and maps. Throw in a little narrative confusion,
and finish it off with some over-the-top CGI
madness. King Arthur just can’t catch a break onscreen, but could there be hope?
Many adaptations place King Arthur in a vague, medieval-fantasy-ish England,
perhaps because it's easier than explaining the historical,
political, and cultural realities of their version of the character.
"Welcome to Camelot."
But this reliance on obscurity creates its own mess of problems.
Arthur's origins are British — not English. By British, we mean the various Brittonic-speaking
Celts of Sub-Roman Britain that would come to be known as "Cymry." These are primarily the
modern-day Welsh, Cornish, and Breton. And by English, we mean the various Germanic tribes:
primarily the Saxons, Jutes, and Angles that would come to be known as "English."
Many scholars believe that if Arthur was a single individual who actually existed,
he would have been part of Sub-Roman Britain's 5th and 6th century resistance to Saxon invasion.
Here's the thing: the Irish, or "Scots" at the time, and the Picts of modern-day Scotland
were also taking advantage of the fractured, weakened state in which Rome's withdrawal had
left Arthur's Britain. Surrounded by threats on all sides, the odds were insurmountable. And yet,
historical evidence suggests that for at least a couple generations, someone,
possibly even a guy named Arthur, was able to unite his "countrymen," fend off these enemies,
and bring peace and stability to the region.
None of this means that Arthur hasn't been extremely important to English identity,
or that he can't be depicted as English. It simply means that screenwriters have to decide who,
or what, their Arthur will be fighting. The issue isn't that so many adaptations get the
tradition or history "wrong," but that so few of them see this decision as integral to their
story. Without "insurmountable odds" and a lost cause, Arthur's story has no meaning.
John Boorman's "Excalibur" doesn't trouble itself with such decisions. Instead, Boorman stuffs his
movie with as many King Arthur allegories as he can, but no tangible enemy for most of the film.
"Where hides evil then, in my kingdom?"
That leaves us with one of the least compelling Arthurs in recent history.
It's understandably tricky to make Arthur's "big bad" the Saxons in a narrative that positions
him as an English hero, but the protagonists and villains of Guy Ritchie's "King Arthur:
Legend of the Sword" are so vague that it's difficult to care about either faction. Sure,
the linguistic mishmash and laddish flash-forwards feel arbitrary and out
of place in this CGI-reliant tornado of fantasy vomit. But they're not even the
worst aspect of "Legend of the Sword." Sadly, they might be the best part.
"Now tell me a story about a girl called Lucy,
a Viking called Grey Beard, and some rebel graffiti dirtying these walls."
"Are you writing a book?"
The film isn't set in any particular, real-life era or place. That could work,
except that the world we are given is so scattered and generic in its
"otherworldly-ness" that we can't place, relate to, or derive any meaning from it.
Legends like Arthur endure not because of their fantasy, but because of our collective belief in,
and need for, their reality. We want to believe in Arthur as if he's a real person,
and while that doesn't mean he needs to be "realistic," it does mean we need to see our
real-world hopes and struggles reflected in his story. Ritchie's world provides no
such reflection. There's a universe in which Ritchie's film comments on the abusive power
that the wealthy wield over the working class, but that universe is not this one.
Which brings us to writer David Franzoni and director Antoine Fuqua's pile of anachronistic
chaos, 2004's "King Arthur." Fuqua's mistake isn't that he keeps things too vague. It's that he tries
to be specific and "accurate," but in the most confusing manner possible. We can forgive the
film for calling the Picts "woads," and for dressing said woads in leather nipple belts.
We can even forgive it for weaving 12th century story additions into its 5th century narrative,
since frankly, no one wants to see an Arthur without a Merlin and a Lancelot.
The rest of this, however, is historically unforgivable.
The film opens with the words, "Historians agree that..." — and
there's our first issue. Historians don't agree on anything, least of all Arthur,
and this inaccurate and inadequate appeal to authority is a sign of things to come.
Not only does Franzoni have a Roman elite living several days north of Hadrian's Wall,
he also has Saxon tribes invading Britain from the northwest corner of modern-day Scotland. Did
these 5th century Saxons come from Iceland? Was their map upside-down? We can't know.
There are other historical and geographical issues here,
but they pale in comparison to the film's confused understanding of Sub-Roman Britain.
In the 2004 film, Clive Owen's Arthur gallops around shouting about personal freedom while
attempting to free his warriors of their service, and poor farmers from the lands they serve.
"These are our orders. We leave at first light and when we return,
your freedom will be waiting for you."
What this Arthur is effectively doing is ensuring these people have no food,
no community, no protection in times of war, and nowhere to live.
There are so many issues with this film, including its half-baked use of C. Scott
Littleton and Ann C. Thomas' Sarmatian Connection, its complete misrepresentation of Pelagianism,
and its wacky portrayal of both the Romano-British and the Picts. Again,
there's a universe in which Arthur as a champion of inherent, individual freedom makes sense,
but that universe is 18th century France — not 5th century Rome or Britain.
That said, the fact that "King Arthur" at least attempts to give its leader a
cause places it firmly above STARZ's failed medieval series, "Camelot."
In this accidental parody of itself, Eva Green's Morgan exists solely to glare, seduce,
and serve as a warning about the dangers of female ambition. We're given no reason to care about the
series' tween-ish Arthur, save the fact that he is Arthur, or for the one-dimensional Guinevere.
It's possible "Camelot" had redemption arcs in mind, but you can't build on a busted foundation.
"Camelot," like the vast majority of all on-screen Arthurian adaptations,
is a bit like watching a first grader recite Shakespeare. The words are there,
but the comprehension and delivery are not. Ironically, they usually are there in productions
aimed at younger audiences. Adaptations such as Disney's "The Sword in the Stone," for instance,
benefit from being forced to think about what the message is in the process of relaying it
more simply. Arthurian parodies benefit from this deconstruction process as well.
"Who are the Britons?"
"Well, we all are. We are all Britons. And I am your king."
"Didn't know we had a king. I thought we were an autonomous collective."
When more serious adaptations have managed to strike the right balance of subtext,
context, history, and plot, it's almost always because they've
chosen to focus on a single character or storyline from the wider tradition.
This is why Jerry Zucker's "First Knight" isn't one of the worst Arthurian movies ever made. At
the very least, "First Knight" focuses on a single element of the legend, and is fairly
clear about what its Arthur is attempting to create. It also provides a nuanced and
relatively historically informed understanding of Chrétien de Troyes' famous courtly love triangle.
Does this mean adaptations can't succeed if they attempt to tell the whole story? No. At least,
not if they use their source material wisely.
You'd be hard-pressed to find a version of the Arthurian legend that's truer to
its historical and cultural origins than Bernard Cornwell's Warlord Chronicles.
The trilogy is so fully embedded in what little history we know of the time period,
and so thoroughly informed by Brythonic mythology, that it's easy to forget that
these are works of fiction written in the '90s. The first-hand account we're given is
through the eyes of an aging pseudo-monk named Derfel, who was once Arthur's loyal friend.
Every time Derfel reveals a gap between the legend and his lived experiences, we get the
impression that for the first time, we actually are hearing "the real story." Cornwell's trilogy
finds a way to historically re-position and ground the well-known elements of Arthurian legend. It's
an effective, and easily adaptable, structure. And since Cornwall has already done the research
required to resolve the historical Arthur with the literary one, Bad Wolf's upcoming television
adaptation won't have to wrestle with that aspect unless it decides not to trust its audience.
It also won't have to decide what its Arthur represents. Cornwell's Arthur stories are
political in nature, meaning that they speak to the political mechanics of a "just society."
"What I do now, I do for my people, and for Camelot."
In the trilogy's first novel, "The Winter King," Cornwell tells us exactly how his Arthur thinks
society should operate. Arthur believes "a king is only as good as the poorest man under his rule,"
and that the strong are duty-bound to protect the weak. He believes justice can't exist unless
oaths are kept, and the laws of a land apply to every citizen. Battles should be fought only to
secure peace, and he never creates a round table of perfect knights — only a Brotherhood of Britain
that relies on various leaders' putting old grudges to rest in the name of keeping that peace.
He's not a king, but a warrior sworn to secure the kingdom of Dumnonia,
or modern-day Devon and Cornwall, until the infant King Mordred comes of age. Arthur's
goal is to unite the warring tribes and kingdoms of Britain so they can
defend themselves against the Saxons, the Irish, and the raiding northern tribes.
It's not particularly romantic to think of Arthur as a "politician," but in the
broadest sense of the term, that's precisely what he has to become in order to secure and
maintain the peace. Like most politicians, Arthur's personal ambitions are in constant
conflict with his political ideals, which are themselves in constant conflict with reality.
Cornwell's entire narrative is a story of lenses and of tensions, both within the individual and
society as a whole. Nowhere are these tensions more apparent than in Arthur's embodiment of them.
For all his lofty ideology, Cornwell's Arthur himself breaks oaths, fights battles in the
name of things other than peace, and can't help but enjoy the thrill of battle. He may
be an idealist, but he lives, as we do, in an un-ideal world. That world is ugly, brutal,
and continually tests his strength — not with CGI monsters or a crisis of Christian faith — but with
a crisis of faith in himself, and by extension, humanity. Like every society that's ever lived,
Arthur's triumphs and defeats are cyclical. But to believe in Arthur is to believe that a better
version of humanity is possible despite this cycle, even when the odds are insurmountable.
We don't keep resurrecting "the once and future king" because he represents
a pretty version of the "once," but because he inspires us to fight for
the "future." Fantasy Arthur can't do that in 2023, but Cornwell's Arthur can.
In the second novel, Derfel argues how powerful ideals in an un-ideal world can be:
"To hear the tales told at night-time hearths you would think we had made a whole new country
in Britain, named it Camelot and peopled it with shining heroes, but the truth is that
we simply ruled Dumnonia as best we could, we ruled it justly and we never called it
Camelot. [...] Camelot exists only in the poets' dreams, while in our Dumnonia, even in those good
years, the harvests still failed, the plagues still ravaged us and wars were still fought."
It's easy to believe in Camelot. It's infinitely harder, and infinitely more heroic,
to believe in and fight for the world in which we actually live.
Now we just have to hope this adaptation sees the romance in an Arthur who,
through his wholly unromantic humanity, can actually speak to that world.