,
10 tweets,
2 min read
Read on Twitter
The Great King Arthur Movie Classic Has Yet To Be Made: A Tragedy In 7 Tweets*
*not counting this one
*not counting this one
KNIGHTS OF THE ROUND TABLE (1953): Stiff and stodgy. Not a bad interpretation of Arthuriana, but not a very good movie.
SWORD IN THE STONE (1963) and CAMELOT (1967): Put them together and you sort of have THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING, but not really. A fluffy prologue followed by a main attraction that's also pretty fluffy.
LANCELOT DU LAC (1974): Compelling final chapter. All grim tragedy, no glory of Camelot. A good all-around King Arthur movie needs both.
PERCEVAL (1978): Honestly the best evocation of the spirit of Arthuriana I've ever seen. Not, of course, a King Arthur movie per se.
PERCEVAL (1978): Honestly the best evocation of the spirit of Arthuriana I've ever seen. Not, of course, a King Arthur movie per se.
EXCALIBUR: An interesting mess. Not so much a construction or interpretation of Arthuriana as a kind of curating of the material, making a heap of it rather than shaping it into something coherent. Some very good material.
FIRST KNIGHT: Honestly disliked so much I've blocked it out and can't even tell you why. Sean Connery has one good line about God making us strong to help one another. That's about it.
KING ARTHUR (2004) Literally a remake of Fuqua's TEARS OF THE SUN but with King Arthur characters. Bears no resemblance whatsoever to anything in the Arthurian canon. Rehabilitates the founder of the Pelagian heresy, which has to be the weirdest deep cut of any King Arthur movie.
ROCKNROLLA KING ARTHUR, aka LEGEND OF THE SWORD (2017): An unmitigated disaster. The one thing any Arthurian hero worth his salt needs, more than anything else, is an ideal, whether he lives up to it or betrays it. Ritchie reduces everything to revenge.
Postscript
I originally had this chronologically wedged in between LANCELOT and PERCEVAL, but I couldn’t resist doing an all-French tweet.
Clearly, Python is orthogonal to the whole question. I already said the classic Arthur movie needs both glory and tragedy, so.
Clearly, Python is orthogonal to the whole question. I already said the classic Arthur movie needs both glory and tragedy, so.
