The Knights of Rome

Ahh, the allure of public domain characters. Why license someone people know when there’s already a character in the public domain that people might have heard of. “Might” is, of course, the operative term there because not all public domain characters are created equal. While Sherlock HolmesOften cited as the world's greatest (fictional) detective, this character was introduced in 1887 (in A Study in Scarlet) and has gone on to appear in hundreds of stories, films, shows, and more. (whose early works are in the public domain) and DraculaHe's the great undead fiend, the Prince of Darkness, the monster based on a real historical figure. He... is Dracula! have remained popular, viable characters in the decades since they were first released, other characters have not maintained their connection to the public eye. We recently discussed one such character, Robin Hood, who hasn’t had a massive, blockbuster success since 1991’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, and now we can touch upon another: King Arthur.

That is not to say that Arthurian legend itself isn’t actively used in popular culture. You can find allusions to it in works like 2019’s Hellboy, which bombed, or 2017’s Transformers: The Last Knight, which also bombed… Huh, yeah, I think we’re seeing a trend here. King Arthur and his band of merry round knights were once quite useful fodder for Hollywood to adapt, with dozens of adaptations of the legends over the years, it’s hard to say that modern tellings have been all that successful at the Box Office. Hell, 2017’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword was such a massive failure that Hollywood hasn’t made another big-budget adaptation since.

Not that the 2017 film is alone in that. We can trace just a little way back to 2004 and King Arthur, when Touchstone Pictures thought the key to making a good Arthurian film was to go “more historically accurate” (a goal at which, we should note, they failed spectacularly). The studio invested $120 Mil into the film and only made back $203.6 Mil, which, by Hollywood Math, makes it a total failure. It was clear the studio had hoped to spin the film out into a whole series chronicling the rise and eventual fall of Arthur’s kingdom (which isn’t yet called Camelot in the film), but its failure squashed all plans for any extra media (outside one video game, which critics generally shrugged at).

And it’s not hard to see why. Even in the director’s cut of the film, King Arthur is an uneven mess. It starts off well enough, with Arthur (Clive Owen), and his knights -- Ioan Gruffudd as Lancelot, Mads Mikkelsen as Tristan, Joel Edgerton as Gawain, Hugh Dancy as Galahad, Ray Winstone as Bors, and Ray Stevenson as Dagonet – returning to Britain after 15 years serving under the Roman Empire. Each was taken from their home and conscripted to service, fighting against the very people they once called kin. Now, though, they should be free, and they all look forward to a quiet life of retirement.

Except their Roman overseer, Bishop Germanus (Ivano Marescotti), pulls a bait-and-switch. He promises them their papers of freedom, but only after they perform one more mission: to head deep into Celtic territory north of Hadrian’s wall to find a Roman family and drag them back, south of the wall, before Saxon invaders kill them all. Unhappy at this turn of events, Arthur still gets his men to venture out and perform this one last task. However, what they find isn’t just one Roman family but a whole village of people, all in need of protection. And even getting them back south of the wall isn’t enough because the Saxons number in the thousands and if someone doesn’t stop them at the wall they could run through and flatten every mile of the kingdom Arthur swore to protect. It’s now or never for Arthur and his knights.

The problems with the film don’t start early at least. The film takes its time with Arthur and his knights, developing them into fleshed out characters. Some get more emphasis than others, with a lot of focus put on Lancelot and Bors while others, such as Tristan and Gawain, are left to be colored in by the actors performing them more than by the script. But, the actors do a solid job, and the director, Antoine Fuqua, at least had the sense to let their solid character work shine through.

The issues come late in the movie when, what was a solid character drama, tries to turn hard to become a military action film. It fails. Fuqua, for all his skill at getting us invested and interested in the characters, doesn’t seem to know what to do once the action starts and the soldiers have to start going. The action, while wide in scope, doesn’t have the right focus. It zooms in on specific arrow hits, sword slashes, and other attacks, but does so without showing the wider context of the battles. It’s hard to know what side is winning or losing in any conflict because the battles aren’t filmed in such a way where you can see anything that’s going on.

The easiest way to describe it is as a soldier scrum. All the men run at each other, get mixed up, and any sense of military lines, let alone who is who, is lost in the mess. Hollywood has done this kind of military filming for years, failing to follow historically accurate battle plans for fights in exchange for a big, messy melee of random combatants that supposedly looks cool (but really isn’t). And sure, I can accept that, even if it isn’t that much fun to watch, but it gets even worse when you remember that this film was meant to be “historically accurate” and, well, it’s not.

The setting of the story is moved back to 6th Century AD, around the time when Western Rome was collapsing and losing its grip on its empire. That setting is fine, especially if you’re on a budget and can afford some basic thatch and straw sets and a few bits of roman armor, but it also means you have to be accurate to the era and the film isn’t. Costumes are wrong, combining a mish-mash of armor and weapon styles from later eras, and there’s even some tech that stands distinctly out of place. When the Celts roll out counterweight trebuchets, a siege weapon that didn’t exist for another three hundred years, you know things have gotten a tad off the rails.

Even dismissing all this, though, the action comes at the expense of the characters. The film, for close to an hour and a half, does a great job of developing its central characters, especially Arthur, Lancelot, and the woman they save from evil Romans, Guinevere (Keira Knightley). They get started on a solid love triangle (especially in the director’s cut), and there’s really solid work built on their stories. All of that fades away in the last act, though, when all character work is thrown out and the scrum starts. Any consideration of arcs, proper character development, or the needs of the story are thrown aside. Crap just happens and then the smoke clears, but by that point (in part because the action really sucks) we in the audience have tuned out.

I think the film needed to decide what it wanted to be. Beyond figuring out how to be historically accurate, it really needed to settle on either being a solid character drama or an action film. It fails to figure that out and, in the end, isn’t satisfying either way. It takes what was a really investing, interesting story about Arthur, his worry about his men, and his duty to his people, and turns it into just another generic action film (complete with washed out blue filters and slow motion action moments). I was really enjoying King Arthur until it morphed into something else, and I was sitting there wondering why everyone forgot this movie exists. And then we got to the action and I remembered clearly once more.

King Arthur could have been a good film. With a little massaging to the accuracy, and just a little bit of reworking to the narrative, we could have had a solid, Arthurian drama. But that wasn’t what the studio wanted. They wanted a bombastic action film, and the movie got forced in that direction. It undercuts what the film was doing so well and ruins a perfectly good film. King Arthur fails because the director, the writer, and the studio failed it right at the end when it seemed like nothing could. And because of that, the film has all but been forgotten now.