King Arthur is not a good movie. It is confused about its messages, poorly paced such that it drags on without a true climax while tacking on an ending with jarring tone, and the characterisation is all over the place. While Clive Owen has great screen presence, and has a calmness and authority that makes him convincing as the fair and commanding Arthur, Lancelot (Ioan Gruffud) has little to do but look pretty, make angry eyes at everything, and joke about sleeping with everyone elses' wives/girlfriends. However, we see absolutely no hint of this sexy, lightheartedness in the whole movie, and the lack of spark between Guinevere and Arthur, or even Guinevere and Lancelot, is keenly felt - there's not even the establishment of a triangle betwen Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot beyond one scene of ambiguous glances and half-nakedness. As for the other 5 knights - Bors (Ray Winstone), Dagonet (Ray Stevenson), Galahad (Hugh Dancy), Gawain (Joel Edgerton) and Tristan (Mads Mikkelsen) - their characterisation and subplots are laid on a bit thick, at times it was like being hit over the head with giant anvils of cliche - but the camraderie amongst them rings truest of the relationships, such that strangely enough, there's more chemistry between Arthur (Clive Owen) and his knights - pick two, any two.
And the story...if you're wondering why so far I haven't mentioned "chivalry" or "magic" or "Morgan Le Fay" or "Excalibur" or "that freaky hand waving the sword out of the lake", that's because they really really didn't go with the legend in writing this story. In fact, at times I had trouble remembering what the original myth was, it was so divorced from that story. Instead, they've thrown in their version of 'reality' - that Arthur is a loyal servant of Rome (and her religion, which they dub as Christianity and proceed to abuse throughout the entire movie), the son of a Roman and a British wife who is leading a fierce band of Sarmatian soldiers in Britain of the Dark Ages. His knights are waiting out the 15 years of their term, and do not love Rome as Arthur does, nor do they follow his religion - but they are completely loyal to him. So when Arthur is forced to lead them on a mission for Rome, starting on the last night of their freedom, they are bitter and weary for home, but they follow him anyway.
The middle of the film drags as they take their sweet time introducing the intersecting groups of this journey in rather broad strokes. We are shown bad Romans (also random "Christians") who are unjust and tricky, and Saxons who are horrible murderers and pillagers, while the Woads and Arthur's knights (the pagans) are shown to be noble and kind to their own, so therefore Arthur realises true freedom by choosing to be with them, to fight with them against the Saxons, to sleep with Guinever - oh wait, that doesn't actually have beating beyond resolving the sexual tension.
The theme - from what I gathered of the simplistic plot, and the messy discussions and arguments that Arthur has with Lancelot, Guinevere, Merlin, etc etc - is that a man's freedom is his choice to belong to a group of people as he is led by his heart and his true moral beliefs, not by the bonds of law or by race. This is so unsubtly pushed at times, and yet flounders by not being supported well by story or by character development or even interesting movie scenes. And with such simplistic, childish boundaries drawn between good and evil, the denoument - small battles leading to an unlikely evisceration of the giant Saxon army by 7 knights and a bunch of Woads led by Merlin and a S&M barbie Guinevere - is violent in a increasingly numbing way that only goes to show how little difference there is between the four groups. They are all fighters, they are all capable of viciousness - it's just that we're supposed believe that the "good" guys are doing it for the right reasons (being just by their own measure, for the love of their land) while the "bad" guys are doing it for no discernible reason or because they're really mean and want to pillage. Right.
All said, I was engrossed enough during the running of the film, and I didn't feel like I'd wasted my money completely. I still prefer the mystical, incestuous, tragic story of the original legend to this, but it's got some interesting interpretation of that. And did I mention that it's a beautiful film? There's some breathtaking scenery, and some genuinely tense and captivating scenes (all of which can be represented in the section on ice, with the endless purity of snow, and the power of the battle in the freeze).
