King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
King Amleth Moses Pendragon, more like it. It’s IP now, a meaningless label to slap on unsellable dross to make it pop.
This dross is a worst version of all those:
- If you want a better King Arthur film (less bad, at least), watch the older one with Clive Owen. The newer one with Russell Crowe is just a generic Magna Carta medieval swords and sandals epic.
- If you want a better Hamlet, bask in the delight of The Northman.
- If you want Moses, The Prince of Egypt is great, an animated musical.
It’s stylish, you can’t deny it. So stylish, it has several of them. On the surface, looks like the generic “gritty” modern film, but there is a metal album cover art peaking here and there. Musically, it’s not metal at all: UNKLE for the sad parts, Woodkid for the action scenes.
There’s barely a plot which is not recursive Hamlet. Mufasa is the king, his brother Scar the jealous second-in-command. The brother does a deal with Sauron to distract his brother with an invasion, while he murders him sub rosa. Moses escapes in a wicker basket.
Art is raised in a lupanar, and turns into a successful small-time mobster. Can he graduate to collecting his dues without kneecapping his subjects?
First, he needs to remove the sword from the stone. Piece of cake, the guard commanded by David Beckham let him evade capture after this, the buffoons.
With Excalibur in hand, some disgruntled nobles from the old days, him pals from the inner city gang, it’s time for rebellion. Undermining the king’s grip, so they can replace him. Seems completely pointless, since they have a nuclear sword DNA-locked to the leader and Fata Morgana, a kind of Physical God capable of manipulating dark and mysterious forces.
Will Arthur be able to retake his god-given status? Of course he can, he’s the son of another king. Merit flows on the blood. Hell, they complain about evil Mordred being power hungry, but the Mages were hunted down, and their own magic ally is kept outside any position of power. Morgana should be the boss, not some mobster.
He is very reluctant to wear the crown and yielding the nuclear sword, Excalibur, but the Lady of the Lake makes him. For all the talk of brotherly love, he snaps after Morgan is threatened; hoes before bros. Of course, Excalibur is the sword of the lake, the sword from the stone is another story all together, but those are mixed, yet again.
After participating on the coup d’etat that deposed the old king, and the dudes get cushy cabinet jobs at the Round Table. Morrigan, by virtue of being a woman, is moved to the mountains.
The “recursive” part of Hamlet happens when one of Arthur’s knights has the same backstory as himself: small kid watching his father being murdered by evil uncle. Well, not his own uncle, but whatever.
In fact, 2 hours long Iron music video is a good summary, if you are feeling generous. Bad people might say 2 hours long aftershave commercial. A series of shorts is not a feature film.
Moses’s story is Levantine myth, “La mort d’Arthur” is early Medieval French propaganda, “Hamlet” is a Renaissance story. We live in the twenty first century, do we not deserve better more relatable stories than hereditary chosen one mythos? Oh wait, this is England, carry on.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.