The Best and the Worst of King Arthur movies

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I’m bumping this post because I’ve just discovered that a new King Arthur movie is in the works.  Now, King Arthur always provides good fodder for story-telling, but I’m not so sure about this: http://moviehole.net/201257625men-in-tights-writer-turns-his-attention-to-spoofing-king-arthur

The title of the article says it all, but here’s a quote:  ”J.D Shapiro wordsmith of “Robin Hood : Men in Tights”, will take the Mickey out of the Knights of the Roundtable in a future feature …  In 524 AD, Arthur Lol Pendragon went to Camelot. One thousand, four hundred and eighty five years later this footage was found. What it reveals is both shocking and more shocking. We have discovered that, out of all the legendary tales told about King Arthur and his knights… not one of them got it right.”.

I think I’m terrified …

______________________

While we’re on the subject of King Arthur, which of course, we always are, except when we’re talking about Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, I thought we could talk movies.   Since I’ve ranted about the King Arthurs I don’t like to read about or watch (http://www.sarahwoodbury.com/the-fictional-king-arthur-rant/), how many King Arthur movie depictions have there actually been?  And how many have been done well?

Here’s the list from Wikipedia of straightforward King Arthur movies:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_based_on_Arthurian_legend

I’ve seen very few of them, as it turns out.  In reading the list, I realized that I found that the movie I liked best was the 2004 King Arthur version where he’s Roman.  The history was bad, and it was a vehicle for Keira Knightly to fight a battle wearing next to nothing, but . . . I still kind of liked it.  The fact that Modred and Morgan le Fay were entirely absent may have had something to do with it.

I tried to watch First Knight when it came out, and then quite recently on Netflix.  I couldn’t cope with it, though normally I’ll watch Sean Connery in anything.  This is the ‘classic’ tale (meaning French) to which I object the most.  Everyone dies in the end.

I can’t believe Quest for Camelot is on this list.  My kids liked it.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court has it’s own category, as it deserves, further down on the web page.  I remember liking it as a kid.  If you haven’t read the book by Mark Twain, you’re missing out.

Colin Firth is apparently in The Last Legion, which has a score of 16% on Rotten Tomatoes.  I’m requesting it from Netflix, because, honestly, with that description how could I not?

Excalibur is also the ‘classic’ tale with the even worse addition of Mordred as Morgana’s and Arthur’s son.  Horrible.

Painfully, I watched Avalon High.  It does have Castle’s daughter, Alexis, as the cheating girlfriend.

Don’t get me started on Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  My son made me change one of the descriptions in Cold my Heart because it was too close to a line from the movie and he couldn’t read it without laughing.  It’s ruined everything :)

I’d love to know how many of these movies you all have seen–and what you thought?

As a side note, this is my favorite King Arthur book:

Avalon by Stephen Lawhead.   There are thousands of books about King Arthur, but this is one of the few that was actually fun.  Hint–he doesn’t die in the end   Publisher’s Weekly liked it too:  “In this rousing postcript to Lawhead’s bardic Pendragon Cycle (Taliesin, Merlin, Arthur, Pendragon, Grail), such a monstrous evil stalks near-future Britain that an ancient Welsh prophecy will be fulfilled: the Thames will reverse its course, Avalon will rise again from the cold gray sea and Arthur will return. A series of Royals so rotten that the Brits can’t wait to dump the whole stinking lot enables scheming Prime Minister Waring to creep trick by political dirty trick toward Magna Carta II, the abolition of the monarchy. Far in the Highlands, though, former career officer James Arthur Stuart feels destiny stir within him. He is Arthur, come again to exalt Britain and its grand old values:  goodness, compassion, mercy, charity and justice. Accompanied by his enigmatic adviser Embries, his boon drinking buddy Calum McKay and the lissome Jenny, James struggles to come into his own, proving his mettle against modern monsters: skinheads armed with pit bulls, the fickle hydra of the press and the redheaded “total dish” Moira, Arthur’s old witchy nemesis who destroyed Camelot. By the time James ousts Moira’s insidiously treacherous buffalo-wing- and pizza-chomping politicos, Lawhead makes even aristocracy-phobes want to stand up at the skirl of the pipes and cheer on the eternal virtues James represents. In revisiting nearly every romantic Arthurian clich? and playing off snappy contemporary derring-do against the powerful shining glimpses of the historical Arthur he created, Lawhead pulls off a genuinely moving parable of good and evil.”

13 thoughts on “The Best and the Worst of King Arthur movies”

  1. Oh, oh, oh. You are speaking my language. I am a King Arthur fanatic…he even makes an indirect appearance in my book, Amaretto Flame! ;-)

    Without a doubt, my very favorite King Arthur book is The Mists of Avalon. Have you read it? It’s the King Arthur story re-told by the perspective of the women in his life. FANTASTIC! AMAZING. *gushes* lol

    The movie was made-for-TV and it was okay, but it didn’t come close to the awesomeness of the book. I have not read Avalon by Steven Lawhead, but it looks like it needs to be on my TBR list!

  2. I totally agree–I kind of liked the Clive Owen King Arthur, too, as much as the history was totally hair-raising. I particularly loved the people running around in togas and living in Italian-esque villas in an area Rome never occupied! ;-)

    I saw the musical Camelot at a local theater when I was maybe 10 and the production was SO bad that there’s this one song–”What do the simple folk do” or something like that–where there was a pause and the audience all thought it was finally over–and then literally let out a collective groan when the actors started in on yet another interminable verse.

    And yet I still grew up to write Arthurian books! :)

  5. Yeah, I really wanted to like King Arthur (2004), but the history… How hard can it be to check a few dates? And what were Saxons doing north of Hadrian’s Wall? Visually fantastic though and I was thrilled that somebody attempted a Dark Age King Arthur closer to what may have originally happened, but then it went and completely undermined itself by crowbarring in characters like Lancelot, Merlin and the round table which belong to much later versions of the legend.

    The Last Legion… I quite liked it. Nothing like the (brilliant) book though. And it suffers from similar problems as King Arthur (2004) with regards to history. But it has some interesting ideas.

  6. My mom’s favorite book is the “Eagle of the Ninth” to which ‘Centurion’ and the new movie ‘the Eagle’ seem to owe their inspiration. I haven’t read The Lost Legion but I’ll give it a shot.

  10. I’m pretty sure I haven’t seen it. If you could direct me to a link online, I’d take a look, but I can’t get it through Netflix.

  11. I have to say, liked mists of avalon the best. it had accurate history, followed the true (Welsh and Saxon ) legends quite closely, and had the magical sorcery that made it seem truly like the story of the Round table. And the fact that Morgan and Mordred were portrayed as actual human beings (with both good and bad) instead of as bloodthirsty monsters helped too.

  12. So far, I’m halfway through Mists of Avalon, and whatever its other merits may be, the history of it is far more inaccurate than King Arthur even. The entire setting is impossibly mediaeval, but with inexplicable Saxons and an ancient Mother Goddess.
    It also departs from the legends in quite a big way, including splitting characters, which originally where one and the same but just spelled differently in different sources, into separate figures. It also suffers from a rather flat Arthur and some of the supposedly good characters are too unlikeable for my taste. And as an afterthought, this story was supposed to be a feminist version of the original, but I can’t find anything of the sort in it – it’s portrayal of women is borderline misogynist, and the story as a whole doesn’t make for a good advertisement for feminism, quite the contrary in fact.
    That is not to say that it hasn’t got any redeeming qualities and maybe it seems I’m being too harsh on it. If that’s the case, keep in mind that this critique is darkened by necessity, to counter your opinion, Venkata.

  13. So many people love Mists of Avalon and I … well … I won’t talk about another author’s book in a public forum. Thanks for contributing to the discussion, Anon.

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