In this modern-day re-telling of the Arthurian legend, Camelot, the Round Table, and Excalibur have all but been erased to focus on "the man behind the myth". Or so we are told. It’s a tall order. These Hollywood fellows are probably doing their best, it’s just that, from a strictly historical perspective, little or nothing is known of the man. Nevertheless, Arthur (Clive Owen) they promise and Arthur they give: an ordinary enough bloke with a kind of wimpy look, but full of true grit, and a great believer in freedom. Not the real person we’re promised, but something more like a Hollywood myth to replace a traditional one, a contemporary representation to replace an outworn one, a fictional character molded to fit a fictional and not always believable narrative. Arthur is profoundly forgettable. The main impression King Arthur made upon me was that it was mostly filmed in beautifully somber and overcast weather with skies that always seemed ready to birth a great thunderstorm. And that at least is fitting as King Arthur is fundamentally a string of battles. Add a few small-scale confrontations, a few run-ins with institutionalized corruption, a few outbreaks of Arthurian wisdom, plus one very short love-scene between Arthur and the enticing Guinevere (Keira Knightly). This very brief love-scene, strategically placed before the final battle, constitutes the very brief narrative and sexual climax of the film. As I watched it I was reminded of Burgess Meredith warning Rocky to stay away from women before a fight as they sap your strength. Seems he was wrong. The loss of Arthur’s "precious bodily fluids", (as General Jack D. Ripper puts it in Dr. Strangelove, 1964), make no dint on Arthur’s destiny. At the critical moment, before the final battle, Arthur’s knights, those old fighters always dreaming of home, abandon him to fight Cerdic’s (Stellan Skarsgård) Saxon horde with nothing more than a handful of villagers, (men who in Cerdic’s opinion are not even worth killing). We see Artie isolated and alone, sitting astride his horse, on the summit of a hill and silhouetted against a dark sky. Not a bad image of a man wearing the dark cloak of his destiny. His knights must have been impressed since they turn back and decide to fight with him. The end of the film is meant to be stirring. Arthur dramatically raises his sword as so many Hollywood heroes have done before him. The people gather round and fall reverently silent. He proclaims that they have been fighting for one thing. We expect the cry "freedom" to sweep like a wave through the crowd -- we expect this because ‘freedom’ constitutes a little thematic thread that Artie has been pounding since the beginning of the film -- he even informs a group of peasants, "You, all of you, were free from your first breathe" -- peasants! free! what will Hollywood think of next? Instead of crying freedom, however, they take up the chant, "Arthur! ... Arthur! ... Arthur!", something which might have struck a note of historicity but comes off more like a Big Brother audience honouring the name of the latest evictee. This nod to reality tv is not as irrelevant as it might at first seem. For all the filmmaker’s talk about greater historical accuracy, Arthur, his knights, even the Saxons, all dress as if they are rock stars about to go onto stage: they sport shaven heads and plaited goatees, Matrix-style ankle-length coats, and piercings and tattoos that look more like post-modern retro-chic than authentic Dark Ages attire. The film’s self-conscious claims to historicity quickly take a back seat to a more voyeuristic interest in actors’ appearances, (including Australia’s Joel Edgerton, and Hollywood’s latest glamour-girl, 19-year old Keira Knightley), creating a space for them to prance about in trendy leather get-ups and play with nasty looking Medieval weaponry.

Which brings me back to the film’s many battles. The stand-out battle scene occurs when Arthur, six knights, and Guinevere, fight off an army of several thousand Saxons on a frozen lake in a mountain pass. Although King Arthur has no interest in real history, there is certainly an interest in film history here, as this battle references the ice-lake battle against an army of Teutonic knights in Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (1938), which in turn was inspired by the climatic chase on sheets of ice being swept downstream towards, (what else!), a waterfall, in D.W. Griffith’s Way Down East (1920). While King Arthur’s ice battle makes extensive use of CGI, (it was actually shot on a meadow in Ireland), it is the use of editorial techniques whose lineage goes back to innovations by Eisenstein and Griffith, that gives this Arthurian battle its power. Since the early 90’s filmic battles have become faster, louder, and infinitely more kinetic through CGI which has provided an inexhaustible array of angles and camera-movements, but have often neglected the expressive power that can be generated by simple techniques, such as cross-cutting the opposing movements of two armies to create the visual tension and force of collision. King Arthur makes ample use of such contrasts. It is such techniques, and not the CGI shots such as those which track the movement of developing cracks from beneath the ice, that carry the battle’s expressive impact. Somewhere in the film Arthur states that, "there will always be a battlefield". Perhaps. A hundred years of film history, however, have proven that as long as there is a battlefield, there will always be an audience willing to watch the spectacle. And in the end, it is spectacle, not history or freedom, that lies at the heart of this film. Did we expect that the heart of King Arthur would be made of anything less?

To buy this film from EzyDVD click here