a let-down
Jul. 7th, 2004 04:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
e_clareWell...TAR and F & G met expectations. Arthur? Huge disappointment. Where to begin? (Here be spoilers!)
To be original, we'll start with the beginning. And what an original beginning it is: text to set the "historical" scene, and a view of a map of Western Europe accompanied by a voiceover. (The V.O., incidentally, sounds less like dear, Welsh Ioan Gruffudd and a million times more like Mancunian Dom Monaghan picking up un petit cheque from Bruckheimer. No joke.) Poor wee Lancelot is obliged to leave his British-accented home (despite the fact that, OMG he's supposed to be French, you ninnies!) and join up with the Roman army. Flash forward 15 years, to Arthur (mmm...Clive Owen) and his 6 ka-niggits: Lancelot (all growed up), Galahad (pretty), Tristan (bearing a slight resemblance to one Sirius Black), Gawain (aka the young Uncle Owen Lars), Bors, and Dagonet (bzuh? I had to check the IMDb just to make sure those were their actual names).
Flash forward an hour into the film, and Keira Knightley finally shows up. Joy. Actually, it started getting good-ish around this bit--but then fell to pieces once again. I'll skip straight to the end, with a brief stop on the sex scene, because that's what made me really mad. First, the sex. Arthur and Guinevere have maybe three conversations, and gaze at one another a lot--then the night before the big battle, she comes into his tent and they *ahem* do it. Does it advance the plot? No. Does it even make sense in the plot? Nope, not really. Some people (i.e., those familiar in any way, shape or form with traditional Arthurian legend--people, incidentally, who should stay far, far away from this) might assume this was a set-up for Lancelot to come in and knock the whole kingdom down; sadly, this is not so. Guinevere and Lancelot gaze deeply at one another quite often, too, but don't have actual conversations, so I guess that's the difference.
Anyway, there's a bighuge battle against the eeeeevil Saxons (you can tell they're evil 'cause they're violent...oh, wait--that's *everyone* in this bloody movie), and [EVEN HUGER SPOILERS AHEAD] two major deaths. Which two, you ask? Why, the two who are most well-known outside Arthurian scholarly circles, that's which two. Yes, that's correct: Tristan and Lancelot both bite it. TRISTAN, people. Tristan, as in "______ und Isolde", classic opera. Tristan is not supposed to die on a battlefield in England, gazing longingly at his falcon in the sky. He's supposed to die in Isolde's arms, and have a 40-minute aria sung about him--not get his torso chopped by some nasty Saxon villain. And Lancelot! You can't kill off the third part of one of the most famous love triangles in history! He needs to bring about the end of an era of goodness and light in the world, so that Arthur may then be killed in a duel to the death with his own son/nephew. It just ain't right!
Worst of all, it was b-o-r-i-n-g. Even the action sequences were boring. In many ways, it felt like the actors and the director really wanted it to be a low-key character study--but the script, and Mr. Bruckheimer, wouldn't let them. In the end, I wish they had used the same cast to make a good, period-accurate version of the traditional legend. The acting chops are there (and I'm sure someone would have still found a way to add in Guinevere's girl power moments), the production values are there--overall, the story just falls flat.
I thought I'd be alright if I just tried to forget everything I'd ever learned about Arthurian legend and/or British and Roman history. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough.
To be original, we'll start with the beginning. And what an original beginning it is: text to set the "historical" scene, and a view of a map of Western Europe accompanied by a voiceover. (The V.O., incidentally, sounds less like dear, Welsh Ioan Gruffudd and a million times more like Mancunian Dom Monaghan picking up un petit cheque from Bruckheimer. No joke.) Poor wee Lancelot is obliged to leave his British-accented home (despite the fact that, OMG he's supposed to be French, you ninnies!) and join up with the Roman army. Flash forward 15 years, to Arthur (mmm...Clive Owen) and his 6 ka-niggits: Lancelot (all growed up), Galahad (pretty), Tristan (bearing a slight resemblance to one Sirius Black), Gawain (aka the young Uncle Owen Lars), Bors, and Dagonet (bzuh? I had to check the IMDb just to make sure those were their actual names).
Flash forward an hour into the film, and Keira Knightley finally shows up. Joy. Actually, it started getting good-ish around this bit--but then fell to pieces once again. I'll skip straight to the end, with a brief stop on the sex scene, because that's what made me really mad. First, the sex. Arthur and Guinevere have maybe three conversations, and gaze at one another a lot--then the night before the big battle, she comes into his tent and they *ahem* do it. Does it advance the plot? No. Does it even make sense in the plot? Nope, not really. Some people (i.e., those familiar in any way, shape or form with traditional Arthurian legend--people, incidentally, who should stay far, far away from this) might assume this was a set-up for Lancelot to come in and knock the whole kingdom down; sadly, this is not so. Guinevere and Lancelot gaze deeply at one another quite often, too, but don't have actual conversations, so I guess that's the difference.
Anyway, there's a bighuge battle against the eeeeevil Saxons (you can tell they're evil 'cause they're violent...oh, wait--that's *everyone* in this bloody movie), and [EVEN HUGER SPOILERS AHEAD] two major deaths. Which two, you ask? Why, the two who are most well-known outside Arthurian scholarly circles, that's which two. Yes, that's correct: Tristan and Lancelot both bite it. TRISTAN, people. Tristan, as in "______ und Isolde", classic opera. Tristan is not supposed to die on a battlefield in England, gazing longingly at his falcon in the sky. He's supposed to die in Isolde's arms, and have a 40-minute aria sung about him--not get his torso chopped by some nasty Saxon villain. And Lancelot! You can't kill off the third part of one of the most famous love triangles in history! He needs to bring about the end of an era of goodness and light in the world, so that Arthur may then be killed in a duel to the death with his own son/nephew. It just ain't right!
Worst of all, it was b-o-r-i-n-g. Even the action sequences were boring. In many ways, it felt like the actors and the director really wanted it to be a low-key character study--but the script, and Mr. Bruckheimer, wouldn't let them. In the end, I wish they had used the same cast to make a good, period-accurate version of the traditional legend. The acting chops are there (and I'm sure someone would have still found a way to add in Guinevere's girl power moments), the production values are there--overall, the story just falls flat.
I thought I'd be alright if I just tried to forget everything I'd ever learned about Arthurian legend and/or British and Roman history. Unfortunately, it wasn't enough.
no subject
Date: 2004-07-07 07:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-07-08 07:15 am (UTC)