Excalibur (1981)

Excalibur (1981)

Directed by: John Boorman

Starring: Nigel Terry, Nicol Williamson, Helen Mirren

I was pretty iffy about watching any movie regarding Arthurian legend as I’m a pretty big fan and I’ve seen nothing but godawful retellings as movies (Merlin and the recent King Arthur come to mind. Both make me want to scour my eyes with steel wool). Excalibur actually pleasantly surprised me.

Excalibur starts with Uther Pendragon (King Arthur’s dad) making a deal with Merlin (Williamson) to help him first win a battle against an opposing king and then to steal his wife. He gets one good roll in the hay with her for the price of whatever baby might pop out because of this union going to Merlin. Of course, Arthur is born and Merlin runs off with the kid, leaving Uther to fend for himself against his enemies. As he dies, he thrusts Excalibur (the sword, not the movie) into a rock and you all know the sword and the stone bit. Arthur grows up, pulls the sword from the stone, becomes king, gets married, starts the round table, has knights, blah blah blah, etc.

Eventually Morgana (Mirren) meets up with Merlin and gets under his wing as she’s kinda magical. Once he reveals his best magic to her, she steals it and more or less kills him. Morgana then uses magic to pretend she’s Guenevere (Arthur’s wife who was cheating on him with Lancelot), has sex with Arthur and gets pregnant. Also, she’s Arthur’s half-sister. The boy who is born, Mordred, becomes — oh, why am I wasting your time with this Arthurian soap opera bullshit?

More or less, Excalibur is pretty good at sticking to the stories (the ones I’ve read, at least. There are more varying and contradictory stories about Arthur and friends than about Jesus), and it even does a decent job at being an entertaining film for the first half of the movie. Really, that’s all the easy stuff. Sword and the stone, round table, knights come around, everything’s happy. Once you get into the super DRAMA stuff that came about in the romance era, things turn Mexican soap opera really quick. Not only that, but Excalibur tried to cram in as much of this stuff as it could into an hour, and it ended up feeling like the last half of Dune. For exactly the same reason, strangely enough. Wonder if that’s a sign.

They took a few liberties with established legends, like leaving out Galahad and combining the characters of Morgan le Fey and Morgause, and the sword in the stone isn’t actually Excalibur and blah blah nerd stuff like that. But I’m not one to yell, “WHERE’S TOM BOMBADIL?!” as long as you can make it entertaining. And I think that John Boorman did that, more or less. He got overconfident at the end there, but it’s the best Arthur movie I’ve seen. Apparently it’s hard for people to make good adaptations of Arthurian legend.

You know what, I take that back. Disney’s The Sword and the Stone is my favorite movie based on Arthurian legend, because it takes just one story and makes it enjoyable to watch without getting too confused in the minutia. And also, Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a much better movie, even though it’s a parody of more than just Arthurian legend and is based in a little more fact. Hell, if it hadn’t been made six years before Excalibur, I would’ve said that they were making fun of scenes from this one. And doing them much better.

You know, I’d just really love to see an Arthur movie that deals with him farting around England right after he becomes king. His goal is basically to clean up the place and get rid of all the bad guys and corrupt people in the land. That would make for a good movie. Maybe.