King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, directed by Guy Ritchie, © Warner Brothers Entertainment, 2017.
Reviewed by Usha Vishnuvajjala (ukv630@gmail.com)
Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017) has
done poorly at the box office and received lukewarm reviews from film critics;
however, a number of medieval and especially Arthurian scholars have found it
to be interesting, entertaining, and less objectionable than they might have
expected. Its unexpected plot, drawn very loosely from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regun Britanniae, and its often
bizarre pastiche of character traits, settings, subplots, and conflicts that
seem to reference everything from Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit films to Batman
Begins to The Empire Strikes Back
make for a somewhat overwhelming experience. Throw in a number of actors in
minor parts who have appeared in other Arthurian and medievalist films and TV
shows, a soundtrack laden with ominous deep-bass thrumming, an alarming number
of nameless and featureless female characters whose only purpose seems to be as
human sacrifices or plot devices, and a bland villain whose obsessive and
murderous quest for power seems to come from largely unexplained supernatural
forces, and we get a film that is difficult to categorize. Its brand of humor
and its attempts to be forward-thinking with respect to gender also fall short.
Of course, the fact that the
film is a confusing mishmash of sources and genres with politics that are
difficult to parse is a way in which it resembles what seems to be the main
literary source for its opening plot, Geoffrey’s Historia (although Vortigern is mentioned in plenty of earlier
sources that claim to be historical). Geoffrey’s version of Vortigern becomes
king by overthrowing King Constans, whom he serves as an earl and an
advisor. Although Constans is Arthur’s
uncle (brother of Uther) in the Historia,
Vortigern is not. After losing the crown to his own son Vortimer and gaining it
back after Vortimer is poisoned and killed by Vortigern’s wife, Geoffrey’s
Vortigern follows the orders of magicians and has a massive fortress built in
Wales, which turns out to be unstable because of two dragons that live
underneath it.
The plot of Ritchie’s film is
instigated by Vortigern, here Uther’s younger brother, becoming power-hungry
after holding Uther’s crown during a battle and then killing his own wife in order
to obtain power from the three sirens that live in the river under Camelot so
that he can kill Uther and Uther’s wife and seize power for himself. The young
Arthur, who Uther was trying to spirit away to safety, drifts down the river in
a boat and is rescued, Moses-like, by women washing clothes in the river in
Londinium (which looks like Rome, complete with Coliseum and what appear to be
seven hills). He is raised in a brothel, and during a rapid flash-forward is
shown to grow into a boxer or brawler and petty thief who also profits from the
workings of the brothel by functioning as a sort of manager and enforcer (I
stop just short of calling him a pimp, although the term might not be incorrect
in this case), who is secretly amassing a fortune of gold coins which he keeps
hidden in chests. Meanwhile, now-King Vortigern, fearing that Arthur still
lives, requires every man of a certain age to come to Camelot to attempt to
pull Excalibur from a stone, so that he can kill the one who successfully does,
ensuring his own reign and potentially seeking to pass on the crown to his own
daughter. Vortigern is also building a great tower, which is unstable and
supported by supernatural forces; it is revealed at the film’s end to contain a
giant serprent, which Vortigern cannot control. Throughout this first section
of the movie, the silly dialogue and physical humor of the Londinium scenes is
intercut with the brutal, murderous, too-serious-to-take-seriously scenes at
Camelot, which is built into a mountainside and most closely resembles a
Himalayan Buddhist monastery with Vortigern’s impossibly tall and modern
(magic) tower added.
This early section of the film
also attempts to paint a culturally and linguistically diverse London with
gender politics that the film seems to view as progressive. The city is full of
people who look different from each other and speak different languages; Arthur
quips to one of his lackeys, who complains that a non-British associate doesn’t
“speak English good,” that he speaks it better than the lackey (there is no
attempt to differentiate between Britons and Anglo-Saxons in this film; the
Briton are “English” and speak English). Tom Wu plays a character in Arthur’s
circle who is referred to as “Chinese George” to distinguish him from the other
George. This almost banal reference to ethnic difference is echoed later in the
film when Arthur says to Bedivere, played by Djimon Hounsou as a sort of wise
senior advisor, that he doesn’t want to hear what Bedivere has to say about
Arthur’s past unless Bedivere is Arthur’s real father, which Arthur thinks is
unlikely. I don’t wish to minimize the importance of casting actors of color in
“canonical” Arthurian roles, or of referring to their race in these banal ways,
which has the effect of both recognizing difference and rejecting the
possibility that it is a problem. These are important developments. But they
still appear alongside the depiction of women as little more than wives and
prostitutes, almost all of whom are nameless and end up dead, and alongside a
sarcastic and often violent masculinity, which is not really tempered by the
fact that Arthur calls other men things like “sweetheart” and “honey tits,”
however much the film’s writers might want it to be. It is also not tempered by
the fact that Arthur’s overconfidence is at times revealed by the woman known
as “The Mage,” who appears as a sort of Merlin figure to train Arthur for the
mental and spiritual tasks he will face in order to reclaim the throne (these
scenes resemble the training scenes from The
Empire Strikes Back more than a little bit). There are few women in the
film who have names or agency (“The Mage,” however important she is, is known
only by her affiliation – she is one of the people known as “The Mage” and has
no name or title beyond that).
Beyond all of that, though,
lies the question of what this film gains by being Arthurian. It would be a perfectly
(or at least equally) coherent film if it was about a young Roman, English, or
British prince who was disinherited by his evil and power-hungry uncle. The
Arthurian references are surprisingly minimal: beyond the names Arthur, Uther,
Vortigern, Camelot, Excalibur, Bedivere, and Perceval, and the brief mentions
of characters named Mordred and Merlin at the beginning of the film, the film
has little to do with Arthurian texts, medieval or modern. What it does seem to
do, though, is draw on the cultural and political capital of “King Arthur” in
order to give the film’s plot stakes that it wouldn’t have on its own. As
Arthur travels upriver to Camelot, pulls the sword out of the stone, escapes
the public execution Vortigern arranges for him, and travels Britain with his
small band of Robin Hood-style outlaws, learning to conquer his own memories
and demons so that he can wield the magical sword that shows him things he does
not want to remember, I repeatedly wondered why we were supposed to care whether
this swaggering boxer and pickpocket who profits from the economic hardship of
women lived or died. The answer to that question does not come from the film;
the answer seems to be “because he is King Arthur.” Although most great—or even
interesting—Arthurian texts, both medieval and modern, reinterpret a kernel of
a story for their own times, incorporating an assortment of sources and adding
new material as they seem fit, what they must also do is introduce or build
their own stakes, whether they are political, moral, or aesthetic. Whether one
finds their stakes compelling, modern Arthurian works by Mark Twain, T.H.
White, Marion Zimmer Bradley, John Boorman, Tay Garnett, Antoine Fuqua, and
others all build stakes for their own plots, ultimately adding to the trove of
Arthurian texts rather than merely using that trove’s existence to justify
creating a work in which little is at stake. In that sense, King Arthur: Legend of the Sword fails
to be a compelling addition to the large canon of Arthurian films.
Usda Vishnuvajjala, American University
