亚瑟王 King Arthur review by James Berardinelli 英文影评

亚瑟王，King Arthur

The legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table are so popular and accessible that they generate a new motion picture every decade-or-so, even though no single movie could ever hope to capture the scope of the entire Vulgate Cycle. King Arthur, from producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day), is the latest re-invention, and the first Arthur movie since 1995's failed First Knight. (I'm not counting 1998's animated The Quest for Camelot, since it isn't really about the king.) Although intended to be serious, this tale of old Britain never convinces us of its straightforward intentions. Every chuckle and snicker heard in the theater comes at the expense of a stentorian line of dialogue or a deeply emotional moment. The term "unintentional comedy" was coined for a movie such as this. Yet King Arthur is too long and too full of itself to offer more than a few fleeting moments of entertainment. It doesn't take long for tediousness to triumph.

 

The film gets off to a bad start when a title card asserts that historians have agreed that there is one man who inspired the tale of King Arthur. Nothing could be further from the truth. When it comes to Arthur, there is no consensus. Many historians believe he is 100% fictional. Others point to one of several men who might have inspired the legend. King Arthur takes the view that this man was Riothamus, a.k.a. Artorius, a Roman commander of half-British descent who fought Saxons for the Emperor during the 5th century. Pretty much everything in the film, except the man's name and a few historical details, is a hodgepodge of material from the Vulgate Cycle mixed indiscriminately with ideas from screenwriter David Franzoni's imagination. The result is a borderline-incoherent story that is so riddled with holes and impossibilities that it defies understanding.

 

Arthur is played by Clive Owen, who is the only one in this mess to display any screen presence. (If Owen is in the running to succeed Pierce Brosnan as James Bond, this will not help his cause.) He is surrounded by a group of knights with familiar names: Lancelot (Ioan Gruffudd), Tristan (Mads Mikkelsen), Gawain (Joel Edgerton), Galahad (Hugh Dancy), Bors (Ray Winstone), etc. Only two of these men have any individuality. Lancelot is an annoying whiner and Bors is an amusing thug. Everyone else is in dire need of his own theme song, such as the one given to Brave Sir Robin in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Who would mix up Tristan and Gawain if each had a couple of minstrels trailing after him?

 

 Merlin (Stephan Dillane) is in the film, too, except he's not a wizard, but an old guy in tattered clothing with a lot of dirt on his face. He's the ruler of the rag-tag Britons and he has decided to join Arthur in driving out the Saxon invaders, who are led by a Big Bad Bearded Barbarian played by Stellan Skarsg錼d, who spends most of his limited screen time whispering menacingly. Arthur, for a variety of obscure reasons, has decided to turn his back on Rome (from whence he hails) and stick around in the snow and fog that defines Britain. I'm sure that the lure of being king has something to do with it, as does the promise of having repeated with Guinevere (Keira Knightley), a flat-chested warrior woman who paints her pale skin blue and wears a faux dominatrix costume. Somewhere in the middle of the movie, she picks up a bow and makes like Legolas.
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If I was being kind, I would call Fuqua's direction uninspired. A more honest appraisal is that it's inept. The battle scenes are horribly staged; half the time, it's impossible to get a clear sense of place or direction. The movie's tone is unbelievably somber; Fuqua takes this story and its characters far too seriously. The top-notch cinematography by Slawomir Idziak is better than the movie deserves. The big one-on-one battle is about as energetic and impressive as the Ben Kenobi/Darth Vader duel in Star Wars. That was fine in 1977, but it lacks the panache and energy we have come to expect 25 years later. (Imagine if Star Wars Episode III used similar choreography for its climactic light-saber duel? If you want to see guys fight like they mean it, watch Troy. (That movie also deconstructs a legend, but does it with moderately greater success.) As for the clash of armies, let's just say that this doesn't come close to The Lord of the Rings, which has become the gold standard for epic battles. By comparison, King Arthur is corroded iron.

 

The concept of taking the Arthurian legends and deleting all of the fantasy elements makes no sense whatsoever, especially in light of the rousing success of The Lord of the Rings. Apparently, Fuqua is trying to make another Braveheart or Gladiator, but he fails to develop Arthur into the kind of individual who can captivate audiences. Not even Owen's performance can make this version of King Arthur compelling. And he's surrounded by a weak supporting cast and a villain whose ferociousness ranks below that of the Fairy Godmother in Shrek 2.

 

Still, the core problem is the screenplay, which seems to have been penned without the consideration that someone in the theater might actually try to piece it together into a semblance of coherency. This is one of those films where there wouldn't be a story if people didn't do inexplicably dumb things. (Like the high-ranking Roman who has decided to build his home north of Hadrian's Wall, right in the midst of hostile territory.) There's one thing we can be sure of, however: the story presented in King Arthur is no more real than the one told in Excalibur (one of the better Camelot movies to-date), despite its protestations to the contrary. If things happened in history like what occurs in this movie, no one would have bothered to remember them, much less fictionalize them into one of the most enduring legends of European culture.

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