[B]rex[it] quondam [B]rex[it]que futurus

[B]rex[it] quondam [B]rex[it]que futurus:

Joe Cormish’s The Kid Who Would Be King

Reviewed by

Kevin J. Harty

harty@ lasalle.edu

The Kid Who Would Be King reflects two hallmarks of Arthurian medievalism, the so-called Breton hope dating from the early twelfth century which promised that Arthur would return in Britain’s times of need, and continuing efforts to retell and reinvent any number of established Arthurian texts and tales for younger audiences, though Cormish’s film aims to be more than simply another example of Arthurian juvenilia.  The director’s earlier film, Attack the Block (2011), had slightly older teens fending off invading aliens from outer space.  The Kid Who Would Be King repeats the same basic narrative thread, but the aliens are zombies buried with Morgana in her subterranean lair, and Earth’s defenders, here recast as Knights of the Round Table, are younger than their counterparts in Attack the Block.

Film has embraced the idea of Arthur’s return in a time of need before.  Marcel Varnel’s 1942 King Arthur Was Gentleman casts the well-known comic actor Arthur Askey as Arthur King, a somewhat timid recruit in His Majesty’s army who finds a sword that he thinks is Excalibur and that he then uses to rally the troops in a film which can be seen as part of Britain’s national war effort.  Less interestingly, Richard Kurti’s lackluster 1994 comedy, Seaview Knights, reincarnates Arthur as a hapless taxi driver from Blackpool who sets off for London to save the country from the misrule of the Gray Knight (read John Major).

Even more frequently, film has expanded the canon of Arthurian juvenilia.  Examples include animated films such as Wolfgang Reitherman’s 1963 The Sword in the Stone and Frederik Du Chau’s 1998 Quest for Camelot; films with unexpected Arthurian connections such as Peter Werner’s 1995 Four Diamonds, Peter Chelsom’s 1998 The Mighty, and M. Night Shyamalan’s 1999 The Sixth Sense; and a number of films based on Twain’s Connecticut Yankee.

The Kid Who Would Be King opens with an animated sequence retelling the medieval tale of Arthur from his pulling of the sword from the stone to his imprisoning of Morgana in a tangled subterranean lair.  Arthur’s success is due to his ability to turn enemies into allies, and Arthur promises to return should England in the future find itself home to a fractured and leaderless society.

The film then shifts to the present to tell the story of twelve-year old Alexander (Alex) Elliot (Louis Ashbourne Serkis), the victim, along with his friend Bedders (Dean Chaumoo), of repeated school bullying at the hands of Lance (Tom Taylor) and Kaye (Rhianna Dorris).  In a nice touch, Alex lives on Malory Road. The film’s England is clearly more chaotic and unstable than it has been for centuries, and as Alex runs past a bank of newspaper boxes on his way to school, headline after headline proclaims that the situation is just as bad around the globe.  Bedders is more readily the object of school bullying than Alex. He is pudgy and East Indian, while Lance is tall, blonde and blue eyed; and Kaye is tall, athletic, black, and female. Bedders sees parallels for his relationship with Alex in cultural reference points appropriate for someone their age: Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, and even Shrek— The Kid Who Would Be King bridging cinematic genres at times to become an Arthurian buddy film as well.

Our teens are enrolled in the Dungate School, apparently a British public school with no other distinction than its Kentish-related name.  And opposite the school sits a building site for the yet-to-be-completed Bastion Estates.  Chased by Lance and Kay, Alex seeks refuge amid the site’s rubble, only to discover and dislodge the sword in the stone.  England now being, we are told, divided, fearful and leaderless, it is high time for an Arthurian return, even if the Arthur is a twelve-year old boy, desperate to find his father and to escape bullying from the likes of Lance and Kay.  Alex’s most prized possession is a book from his father, The Knights of the Round Table, attributed to M.A.B. Parker, and inscribed “To my once and future king. Dad.”  And with help from Bedders (and Google Translate), Alex links the sword to Excalibur, after deciphering the inscription on its handle: “The Sword of Arthur, Son of Tintagel.”

The drawing of the sword from the stone awakens Morgana (Rebecca Ferguson), and summons Merlin (more properly Merlin Ambrosius Caledonius) who is variously a teenager (the truly remarkable Angus Imrie), a slightly befuddled old man living backwards (Patrick Stewart, who seems to have come along for the ride just to have some fun), and an owl.  To survive, Merlin needs occasional drafts of a magic potion made from beetle juice, beaver urine, and ground animal bones—coincidentally, they are the same ingredients of the special meal for sale at the local Lickin’ Chicken fast food outlet: cherry aide, vanilla ice cream, and chicken nuggets—if nothing else persuades moviegoers to avoid the Cineplex refreshment stand, this joke, repeated twice in the film, should. Disguised as Merton, a transfer student, the teenage Merlin shows up at Dungate and tells Alex and friends that Morgana has been awakened and that, within four days, during a solar eclipse, she and her army of zombie knights, the mortes miles, will rise up and rule a world now dominated by policies and politics that pit “people like us against people like them.”

Taking a cue from the story of Arthur told in his favorite book, Alex attempts to make allies of his enemies, and sets up a new round table—once the leaves on the drop down table in Lance’s dining room are raised.  The four decide to set out, with Merlin in all three of his forms in tow, for Tintagel, to find Alex’s long lost father, convinced that he will help them defeat Morgana.  In keeping with Arthurian tradition, the four adopt a chivalric code that requires them to honor those whom they love, to refrain from wanton offense, to speak the truth at all times, and to persevere in any enterprise until the very end.  The oath which they take to uphold their version of the code is not quite Sir Thomas Malory’s Pentecost Oath, but it will eventually serve a similar purpose in The Kid Who Would Be King to test the mettle of any would-be knight.

From left to right: Lance, Bedders, Alex, the younger Merlin, and Kaye.

Alex soon discovers that his father was haunted by demons—he was a violent drunkard—and abandoned him, the inscription in his Arthurian book having really been written by his mother (Mary Gough). At first disappointed, Alex rallies his classmates, and thanks to outfits purchased from a local costume shop, Pendragon Replica Weapons—located quite near the King Arthur’s Arms Pub and Inn—he leads his knights to Glastonbury Tor where they engage and, they think, defeat Morgana, who is only wounded rather than killed because Alex himself has violated the chivalric code in not honoring his mother by remaining angry with her for deceiving him about what really happened to his father.

Morgana

Soon enough the stage is set for a more decisive battle which involves enlisting the help of all the students at Dungate, who come together having been knighted and armed, to battle Morgana and her mortes miles.  After much give and take, Alex beheads Morgana, and victory is declared, though the victory is local and small scale. The larger world is still filled with evil which turns people against each other, but, in a somewhat preachy, Pollyanna-esque finale to a film that is already running more than a bit too long, the older Merlin rewrites Alex’s Arthurian book—the author credit changes to M. A. Caledonius—to include Alex and his friends’ victory over Morgana.  Merlin then tells us that children have an abundance of inherent goodness and nobility and that the future is theirs. “There is a wise old soul in every child, and a foolish child in every old soul.”  Merlin assures Alex and his friends that “Excalibur may disappear, but you know what Excalibur stands . . . for.  A land is only as good as its leaders, and you will make excellent leaders.”

The older Merlin and Alex.

The Kid Who Would Be King is filled with references to other examples of Arthuriana and to popular culture in general. A mother’s gift to her son of an Arthurian book informs Alan Crosland’s 1917 silent Knights of the Square Table.  Merlin’s enlisting school children to save the world from a reawakened and vengeful Morgana is the plot of Robert Tinnell’s 1995 Kids of the Round Table—another film in which the hero is a bullied boy named Alex. Morgana’s underworld imprisonment recalls that of Merlin in John Boorman’s 1981 Excalibur.  Boorman’s film is also the inspiration, minus the operatic accompaniment, for all but one of the scenes in The Kid Who Would Be King in which the Lady of the Lake retrieves or returns Excalibur. The exception, in which Excalibur pops up out of a bathtub, echoes a similar scene in David Bourla’s 1986 The Knight Before Christmas. The teenage Merlin uses an Arthurian take on the power of the Force from the Star Wars franchise to convince adults to do what he wants them to do.  Both the younger and older Merlin sport Led Zepplin tee shirts in a nod to Guy Ritchie’s 2017 King Arthur, the trailer for which featured the band’s 1969 song “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You.” Bedders is dubbed Sir Bedders-vere.  Ferguson’s Morgana is at first a diminutive harpy worthy of Ray Harryhausen and subsequently something much, much larger that seems to have escaped from Game of Thrones. Tintagel and Glastonbury Tor are, of course, meccas for Arthurian tourism.

The politics of The Kid Who Would Be King are hardly subtle in light of current economic, political, religious and social upheavals both in Great Britain and across Europe that have fueled intolerance and suspicion and contributed to a rise in nationalism.   And although Brexit is never directly mentioned, it too hangs over the film’s depiction of an England riven by factionalism and fear, and thus in need of Arthur’s promised return.  The film’s antidote to such factionalism and fear is not especially profound or thought-provoking, but it does contain an unexpectedly royal echo.  The reigning monarch has twice, in her annual Christmas message and in a more recent speech in Norfolk, called upon her subjects to adopt more civility and compromise in their public and private lives: "Every generation faces fresh challenges and opportunities. . . . As we look for new answers in the modern age, I for one prefer the tried and tested recipes, like speaking well of each other and respecting different points of view; coming together to seek out the common ground; and never losing sight of the bigger picture. . . . To me, these approaches are timeless, and I commend them to everyone.” (See the New York Times 26 January 2019: A4.)  Cornish’s film issues a similar call for civility and compromise, though whether his young heroes will be able to change the course of public discourse any more successfully than Her Majesty the Queen is highly doubtful, especially given the film’s more than dismal initial box office receipts which, according to Variety, promise a loss of close to $50 million for 20^th Century Fox.

The Kid Who Would Be King directed and written by Joe Cornish; produced by Nira Park, Tim Bevan, and Eric Fellner; with Louis Ashbourne Serkis, Rebecca Ferguson, Patrick Stewart, Dean Chaumoo, Tom Taylor, Rhianna Dorris, Angus Imrie, and Mary Gough; a 20^th Century Fox release, presented in association with TSG Entertainment, of a Working Title Films/Big Talk Pictures production. 2019. Running time: 120 minutes.

Kevin J. Harty

LaSalle University

We Want Wall. We Want Knight. Not

We Want Wall. We Want Knight. Not. Medievalism and the Atlanta Super Bowl 

Richard Utz 

ricutz@me.com

In December, 2018, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen made a baffling statement during an appearance before the House Judiciary Committee. When pressed on her views on how to best protect the country’s borders, she stated: “From Congress I would ask for wall. We need wall.” While some observers read her statement as a moment of comic relief in the midst of a looming government shutdown and the resignation of the defense secretary, Nielsen’s perhaps stress-induced double elision of the definite article revealed how the “wall” had become a self-standing but extremely vague signifier for the larger political struggle about immigration.

During the ensuing discussion, various Democratic politicians denounced the wall as an ineffective “medieval” solution. President Trump countered that a medieval wall “worked then, and it works even better now.” As Paul Sturtevant commented in the Washington Post, this exchange about the medieval ‘nature’ of the wall showed how both political positions misread medieval culture from a an uninformed presentist perspective: “Critics of the wall used the term derisively. When they say something is ‘medieval,’ they are evoking the outdated image of the ‘dark ages,’ where everyone was muddy, bloody, backward and superstitious. … President Trump linked the wall to the Middle Ages, knowing that “for a significant portion of the American public, especially among his base, being ‘medieval’ is not a bad thing. Instead, it’s aspirational.” His invocation of “medieval” seems to speak directly to a white nationalist audience whose members have been coopting racist and masculinist readings of the medieval world for many years. Remember the violent demonstrations at Charlottesville, VA, in 2017?

I was struck by a similar intentional elision of historical specificity and dog whistle referentiality when, some days ago, the widely known ‘Bud Knight’ began to be projected onto the still only half-finished 101 Marietta Street Building in Atlanta as part of the city’s public celebrations for the Super Bowl LIII. [Thanks to medievalist © Daniel Kline for the photo] This year’s ‘Bud Knight’ is an extension of Anheuser-Busch InBev corporation’s “Dilly Dilly” trilogy of medieval-themed Super Bowl ads which, according to research done at Humboldt University, Germany, and Stanford University, continue to sustain companies’ branding and sales efforts long after the actual sports event for which they are produced. Thus, the 2018 medievalist ad investment may well have increased Budweiser sales by as much as 3.9 percent and revenues by as much as 4.7 percent as the Super Bowl ads continued to run during the post-event weeks. It is clear that these impressive 2018 numbers convinced Anheuser-Bush InBev that the campaign might work even across multiple years.

Megan Arnot has recently provided a revealing assessment of the ‘Bud Knight’ and several other medieval-themed ads by Capital One, Gillette, the U.S. Marines, INTEL, Miller Lite, and Pepsi for The Public Medievalist: She concludes: “Advertising sells you an image of yourself, improved by their product.” Therefore, in order to make the typical Super Bowl audience purchase more Bud Light, offering them an image of martial and virile manhood is a tried and proven option. Of course, the advertisers don’t want to exclude women entirely: “But the focus is still on masculinity, particularly a martial or virile masculinity. In [the case of the ‘Bud Knight’ ads], masculinity does not have to mean a life that women can’t participate in. But men are always the majority of the central figures: the heroes, the kings, the knights. Though women may be present, the focus is on male figures—when they are not objects, women should be participating as one of the boys.”

If advocates of the “We Want Wall” campaign use it to rally President Trump’s electoral base with the help of a medievalist reference, Anheuser-Busch’s revival of the ‘We Want [Bud] Knight’ for Super Bowl LIII seems to follow a similar strategy, one geared towards an audience with a similar image of a martial and virile Middle Ages. I wonder, however, if the company and its ad agency realize that the vague reference to the imagined continuities between medieval knights and 21^st century football players and their fans may dredge up some unintended associations. After all, this year’s Super Bowl doesn’t take place in Minneapolis, MN but in Atlanta, GA, and for the U.S. South the history of knighthood is invariably linked with the history of slavery. Southern political leaders and plantation owners in the nineteenth and early twentieth century anchored their practices with numerous specific references to the Middle Ages, and the Southern belle and the Southern gentleman constructed their identities based on those of the medieval (English or Scottish) courtly Lord and Lady. If you don’t believe me, here is what Mark Twain had to say about the influence of Walter Scott’s historical novels (for example Ivanhoe) as a ‘cause’ for the U.S. Civil War in his Life on the Mississippi:

Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and by his single might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society. He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote. Most of the world has now outlived good part of these harms, though by no means all of them; but in our South they flourish pretty forcefully still. Not so forcefully as half a generation ago, perhaps, but still forcefully. There, the genuine and wholesome civilization of the nineteenth century is curiously confused and commingled with the Walter Scott Middle-Age sham civilization; and so you have practical, common-sense, progressive ideas, and progressive works; mixed up with the duel, the inflated speech, and the jejune romanticism of an absurd past that is dead, and out of charity ought to be buried. But for the Sir Walter disease, the character of the Southerner–or Southron, according to Sir Walter’s starchier way of phrasing it– would be wholly modern, in place of modern and medieval mixed, and the South would be fully a generation further advanced than it is. It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a Major or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations. For it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them. Enough is laid on slavery, without fathering upon it these creations and contributions of Sir Walter.

Walk the streets of Atlanta, and you can trace the remnants of the mentality Twain (admittedly exaggeratedly) laments: Visit Margaret Mitchell House, and you may understand how Mitchell’s famed 1936 novel, Gone With the Wind, and its 1939 movie version yearn back to “…a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind….” Or stop by Rhodes Hall on Peachtree Street, a now musealized former private residence modeled after a medieval castle in 1905. It romanticizes the Lost Cause, its generals, politicians, and slavery in a series of magnificently produced painted glass windows. Rhodes Hall’s massive Romanesque Revival stone walls were (aptly) constructed with boulders extracted from Stone Mountain, a commanding geographical presence, 1,686 feet tall and 3.8 miles in base circumference, only 16 miles outside of the center of Atlanta. In 1915, stirred by the nostalgic depiction of the nineteenth-century history of the (first) Ku Klux Klan in D. W. Griffith’s 1915 silent film, Birth of a Nation, activist William Simmons, together with over a dozen other men, revived the Klan on Thanksgiving Day, 1915, by igniting a flaming cross on top of the mountain. Stone Mountain also features the well-known gigantic three-acre relief sculpture, 400 feet above the ground, and inaugurated as recently as 1970, of Confederate icons Robert E. Lee, Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, and Jefferson Davis, together with these cavaliers’ favorite horses, “Blackjack,” “Traveller,” and “Little Sorrel.” While owned by the State of Georgia, Stone Mountain has been transformed into a theme park with various seasonal events that attract c. four million annual visitors, more than any other place in the state. Except for its street address, 1000 Robert E. Lee Blvd, and the stone relief, the company has almost completely cleansed the site of its unpleasant racist history. However, this hasn’t kept ever new groups of neo-Nazis, Klan members, Sons of Confederate Veterans, Neo-Confederate Leaguers, and members of the heavily armed Georgia Security Force III% from reviving, most visibly during the 2016 Rock Stone Mountain event, the Confederate history of Stone Mountain and invite “every able bodied soul of our race” to defend “these lands of green glens, rolling hills, and deep glades” from “being purposely flooded with hordes of raping scoundrels.” The 2016 event was thwarted by the NAACP, Black Lives Matter, All Out ATL, and other counter protest groups, who easily outnumbered the right-wing groups and reclaimed Stone Mountain’s symbolic presence.

Tonight, on the evening of the Super Bowl, the 3,600 acre amusement park section of Stone Mountain is closed because, as Atlanta’s WSB-TV 2 reports, the owners of the park felt they could not provide sufficient security at the site. Park officials had known since November that white supremacists were planning a rally close to the widely televised Super Bowl. “Officials had been considering closing the park for at least a week after the group vowed to hold the rally despite being denied a permit. On Thursday, that group announced they had canceled their rally amid infighting and fears for personal safety.” According to the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, a small group of left-wing activists showed up on Saturday, despite the park closure. As they marched, they shouted “Good night, alt right” and “Death to the Klan,” burned a Klansman in effigy, and sported signs with slogans like “Sandblast Stone Mountain,” “Death to the KKK” and “Dixie be damned.” As a medievalist, who sees the connections among the above medievalisms, my own sign would probably have red, “We Don’t Want Knight.”

This is the context within which the famed ‘Bud Knight’ is making its reappearance in the 2019 Atlanta Skyline and at Super Bowl LIII. Unlike the harmless pun that brought us the Knights Inn hotel chain, the ‘Bud Knight’ needs to be recognized for what he is, even if he masquerades as just another fun superhero to please ‘the boys’.

Postscript: I wrote this entry and published it intentionally right before the Super Bowl game began. And then I witnessed one of the smartest and surprising commercial mashups between the Budweiser and Game of Thrones brands: Sir Gregor Clegane of GoT fame entered the world of the Bud Knight and simply killed him off.  In GoT, Sir Gregor is known as "The Mountain," a giant of a man who serves the evil queen Cersei. The mashup may have delivered us from "Knight", but now we have "Mountain" instead. And here in Atlanta, in light of the history and symbolic heritage of Stone Mountain, the mashup feels more like a step back towards 1915 than progress toward a world with less violence and racism.     

Richard Utz

Aquaman, dir. James Wan

SPONGE ARTHUR ROUND PANTS?

Aquaman, directed by James Wan

Reviewed by Kevin J. Harty, La Salle University

harty@lasalle.edu

Cinema arthuriana is not a film genre.  Rather, it is a form of film medievalism that lately can be found in more and more cinematic genres.  Cinema arthuriana had its beginnings at least as early as 1904 when Thomas Edison, with mixed success, brought a version of Wagner’s Parsifal to the screen for New York audiences, thereby not only establishing cinema arthuriana as a new form of medievalism, but also reworking an already established form of medievalism, opera arthuriana, into a new genre. 

Twain has remained the most frequent source for cinema arthuriana on both the large and on the small screen, with nods (often more alleged than real) to Malory informing any number of other Arthurian films.  And Arthurian films (and television programs) have at times proven to be fades, and the current decade seems no exception.  The 1950s, for instance, gave us The Adventures of Sir Galahad (a serial), The Adventures of Sir Lancelot (a television series penned by blacklisted Hollywood writers), The Black Knight, at least three television versions of Twain’s Connecticut Yankee, Knights of the Round Table, Knutzy Knights (a Three Stooges’ vehicle), a Spanish Parisfal, and Prince Valiant.

More recently, Arthur, or Arthurian motifs, can be found in some unexpected films: in the Kingsman franchise, in Ready Player One, in Mad Max: Fury Road, in Transformers: The Last Knight, even in the latest (and supposedly last) installment of the Syfy Channel’s Sharknado franchise.  And now in James Wan’s 2018 Aquaman.

Like Arthur, Aquaman has had a complicated legacy.  The DC Comics’ hero first appeared in 1941 in a supporting role, but his character subsequently came into its own when Aquaman became a founding member of the American Justice League.  As his character developed, his appearance also changed from wimpy kid to wonder boy to buff, often overly so, super hero—sometimes blonde, sometimes not; sometimes bearded, sometimes not.  Originally, his foes were Nazi submarine commanders and other Axis villains.  Eventually, his identity was fleshed (fished?) out: he was Arthur Curry, son of a lighthouse keeper and of an outcast queen of the underwater world of Atlantis.  By either his mother or his father, he had a troubled, or trouble-some, half-brother, with whom he would eventually come into conflict. His super powers included an ability to communicate with marine life and to live both on land and under water.  Aquaman’s character has appeared not only in print, but also on television and on film, and as the butt of a long-running joke on HBO’s series Entourage, in which Adrian Grenier’s Vince Chase was cast in a fictional version of Aquaman directed by Titanic’s James Cameron, but not in its sequel. (For more on Aquaman’s development as a superhero across multiple genres, see Alastair Dougall’s The DC Comics Encyclopedia.)

In James Wan’s Aquaman, Jason Momoa plays the title.  Momoa began his entertainment career in 1998 as a swimwear model.  At 19, he was chosen for the part of Jason Ioana, one of the lifeguards in the television action series Baywatch Hawaii.  After repeated trips to the gym and to the tattoo parlor, Momoa’s career blossomed, and he was cast in (literally) meatier roles including that of the title character in a remake of Conan the Barbarian and, perhaps more famously, that of Khal Drogo in HBO’s Game of Thrones.

Aquaman opens in Maine in 1985 as lighthouse keeper Thomas Curry (Temuera Morrison) rescues a woman who has washed ashore.  She is Atlanna (Nicole Kidman, who adds much needed gravitas to the film), the princess of Atlantis, fleeing a forced marriage.  Thomas and Atlanna fall in love, and have a son, Arthur.  Atlanna is kidnapped and returned to Atlantis where she is executed for having a half-breed son by being sent into the ominous sounding Trench.  Flash forward to the present when that half-breed son Arthur, who has been secretly trained in Atlantian ways by Nuidis Vulko (Willem Dafoe), single handedly defeats a group of pirates attempting to hijack a Russian nuclear submarine.  When their leader, Jesse Kane (Michael Beach), is killed during the unsuccessful hijack attempt, his son David (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) vows revenge—David it turns out is a mercenary in the employ of Orm (Patrick Wilson), Arthur’s younger half-brother and the King of Atlantis.  Orm has David engineer an attack on Atlantis as a pretext for declaring war on the surface world.  To succeed in such a war, Orm must unite the kingdoms under the sea.  His attempts are thwarted by Princess Mera (Amber Heard), originally Orm’s fiancée, who soon falls in love with Arthur.  

 

Amber Heard as Mera

Arthur, Mera, and Vulko team up to find the long lost Trident of Atlan, which can only be secured by the rightful King of Atlantis.

The Trident is, of course, not easily found, and the search for the mythical talisman drives the plot of the middle of film which sees David Kane return as Black Manta—a potential super villain counterpart to Black Panther—to hinder Arthur and Mera’s quest.  After multiple adventures that include a trek across the Sahara and a visit to Sicily, the two end up beneath the surface of the ocean, defeating a legion of amphibious creatures in the Trench, and facing down the Karathen, a gigantic monster who guards the trident.  Arthur claims the Trident and astride a seahorse leads an army of sea creatures to defeat Orm.  Along the way, he discovers his mother is still alive.  Atlanna returns to Thomas.  Orm is imprisoned, and Arthur agrees to become King of Atlantis. 

Aquaman (Jason Momoa) on the left confronts his half-brother Orm (Patrick Wilson)

As superhero comics films go, Aquaman is nothing spectacular.  The plot wastes no time establishing a complicated backstory for its title character.  The film’s tone is uneven.  At times, the tone is serious; at times, tongue in cheek.  There are some throwaway lines of dialogue that are potentially funny, but both verbal and visual gags fall flat more often than not.  In one scene early in the film, when Arthur is confronted by three burly bikers in a bar, we expect the usual brawl that destroys the bar, but the three simply want to pose with Arthur for a selfie—which they incongruously snap using a shocking pink iPhone.  Arthur comes off as more than a bit thick; Mera is the brains of the duo.  Costumes hypersexualize the characters.  Momoa’s Aquaman seems to own no shirts; until he retrieves the Trident, he only wears waterproof form fitting vests to complement his skin tight waterproof jeans.  Heard’s outfits as Princess Mera are a study in aqua colored spandex. The pace of the film, which is too long by about half an hour, drags on and on until Arthur retrieves the Trident.  Then the action becomes a riot of CGI on overdrive as Arthur suddenly becomes Aquaman in a green and gold leaf costume, designed to leave nothing to the imagination, riding his seahorse and wielding the Trident to defeat a dizzying array of underwater enemies—so dizzying is that array that it is at times difficult to figure out who is fighting whom—or what.

The Arthurian elements are established by the title character’s first name, and by a variation on the traditionally problematic or unusual Arthurian parentage: for Ygraine and Uther read Atlanna and Thomas.  Aquaman, like Perceval in multiple versions of the Arthurian legend, initially defeats a knight in red armor—here, of course, a sea knight. While King Arthur’s last battle is usually with his illegitimate son Mordred, Aquaman’s last battle with his half-brother Orm is a close enough parallel.  Mera is part Guinevere, part good Morgan le Fay.  Vulko serves as Aquaman’s Merlin, and the Trident is, of course, the film’s Excalibur.  Malory has it that "whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil is rightwise king born.”  In Aquaman, the ability to retrieve the Trident similarly guarantees who is “rightwise king born” of Atlantis. Aquaman’s interrogation by the Karathen at times recalls that of Arthur and his knights by Mighty Tim in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  In John Boorman’s Excalibur, Arthur learns that the secret of the Grail is that the land and the king are one.  In Aquaman, the title character declares that the land and the sea are one. 

Aquaman wears its eco-politics lightly. The counterattack that Orm leads against earth deposits back on land all the garbage that has been dumped into the world’s oceans to pollute them.  But there is no real green agenda to the film, hidden or otherwise.  The slow pace of the film’s middle is partially compensated for by the dizzying pace of its ending.  While Orm is imprisoned at the end of the film in a room with a view (a running joke from earlier in the film), we know enough about the fate of surviving film villains that he will inevitably return, especially since, as the final credits roll, a snarling, and wounded, David Kane reappears still vowing to kill Aquaman for the death of his father—thereby laying the groundwork for a sequel—one has already been greenlit—if not for a cinematic franchise.

The Arthuriad has proven attractive to writers and illustrators of comics for a very long time, perhaps most famously in the case of Hal Foster’s comic strip, Prince Valiant, where the title character, a banished Nordic Prince of Thule, starts out as squire to Sir Gawain.  The comic strip premiered in 1937 and inspired two feature-length films, an animated television series, multiple comic book and bande dessinée series, and a role-playing game. 

Aquaman’s characterization as a modern-day King Arthur does nothing to diminish the Arthuriad, rather it attests to its continuing elasticity.  Aquaman moves the Arthuriad into the world of comics and film superheroes.  And it won’t be the only film to do so.  This Spring promises another Hellboy film, with Milla Jovovich (who played Joan of Arc in the 1999 film The Messenger) as Nimue and Brian Gleeson as Merlin.  And, as if to prove further the prescience of Umberto Eco’s famous understatement in Travels in Hyperreality, “people seem to like the Middle Ages,” the “reel Middle Ages” as juvenilia will again soon be on display in Joe Cornish’s The Kid Who Would Be King, in which a group of young boys joins forces with Patrick Stewart’s Merlin to defeat Rebecca Ferguson’s Morgana and save the world, and in Dean DeBlois’s How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, the third installment in the animated Viking film franchise. 

Aquaman, directed by James Wan from a screenplay by David Leslie Johnson-McCormick and Will Beal; story by Geoff Johns, Will Beall and James Wan, based on characters from DC Comics’ Aquaman by Paul Norris and Mort Weisinger; edited by Kirk Morri; music by Rupert Gregson-Williams; cinematography by Don Burgess.  With Jason Momoa, Amber Heard, Willem Dafoe, Patrick Wilson, Nicole Kidman, Dolph Lundgren, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Temuera Morrison, Ludi Lin, Michael Beach, Randall Park, and Graham McTavish.  Co-produced by DC Films, Cruel and Unusual Films, the Peter Safran Company, and Mad Ghost Productions. Distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures.  Running time: 143 minutes. Release dates: November 26, 2018 (UK); December 21, 2018 (US).