It isn't flat-out silly like "Troy," its actors look at home as their characters, and director Antoine Fuqua curtails the use of computer effects in the battle scenes, which involve mostly real people. I won't let them rape you," also seems somewhat non-historical.)ĭespite these objections, "King Arthur" is not a bad movie, although it could have been better. To the line "Last night was a mistake" in " Troy," we can now add, in our anthology of unlikely statements in history, Lancelot's line to Guinevere as seven warriors prepare to do battle on a frozen lake with hundreds if not thousands of Saxons: "There are a lot of lonely men over there." (Her reply: "Don't worry. Guinevere is not a damsel in potential distress, but seems to have been cloned from Brigitte Nielsen in "Red Sonja." And everybody speaks idiomatic English - even the knights, who as natives of Sarmatia might be expected to converse in an early version of Uzbek, and the Woads, whose accents get a free pass because not even the Oxford English Dictionary has heard of a Woad. There is a round table, but the knights scarcely find time to sit down at it. The movie is darker and the weather chillier than in the usual Arthurian movie. Later he comes across a Roman torture chamber, although with Geneva and its Convention safely in the future, he doesn’t believe that Romans do not do such things. "You - all of you - were free from your first breath!" Arthur informs his charges and future subjects, anticipating by a millennium or so the notion that all men are born free, and overlooking the detail that his knights have been pressed into involuntary servitude.
The imperialists from Rome enter England intent on overthrowing the tyrannical Saxons, and find allies in the brave Woads. This new "King Arthur" tells a story with uncanny parallels to current events in Iraq.