Legend of the Sword

So, back in college I took an Arthurian Lit course. One assignment was to review a modern retelling of the legend. I picked King Arthur: Legend of the Sword and oh boy did 20 year old me have some thoughts:

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is the latest and largest entry into the world of cinematic adaptations of the Arthurian Legend, and it’s just awful. From awkward, video game-like action sequences to a confusing and discordant plot with no clear point or climax, and most egregiously a complete ignorance of the source material, the film doesn’t seem to mimic or expand upon actual tradition in any way. Characters are morphed into unrecognizable figures who share only names with their medieval counterparts or completely left out, major plot points are ignored or fundamentally changed, and many of the dream sequences and supernatural elements which guide Arthur in the older stories are missing; essentially, the story is a Medieval retelling of Star Wars posing as an entry into the Arthurian canon.

To begin, the opening sequence features an epic battle sequence between Uther Pendragon’s forces, defending Camelot from an evil mage and his army of barbarians and giant elephants, a la Return of the King. This mage’s name is Mordred, and he is slain almost nonchalantly by Uther after the king climbs into the wooden fortress atop one of the elephants. To break this down, the Arthurian tradition of Sir Thomas Malory dictates that Mordred is the bastard son of Arthur Pendragon, Uther’s son and heir, and that Mordred survived a massacre when

“King Arthur let send for all the children born on May-day, begotten of lords and born of ladies...and all were put in a ship to the sea, and some were four weeks old, and some less. And so by fortune the ship drove unto a castle, and was all to-riven, and destroyed the most part, save that Mordred was cast up”

The Mordred present in Legend of the Sword is not only a completely different race than Uther and Arthur, but he is seemingly older than both of them. Given that the one consistency in Mordred’s origin is in his birth to Arthur’s half sister, this is impossible.

Moving on to another inconsistency with this first sequence, Uther is given a brother. In the early tradition, Uther appears to be a relative of Ambrosius Aurelianus, but Legend assigns this role to Vortigern, the Brythonic King known for essentially hiring the Saxons to invade Britain. While not a major issue, it breaks away even further. Vortigern betrays Uther, ending in the exile of Arthur and the loss of his identity.

It is in searching for Arthur (so he can execute him) that Vortigern brings in just about the only scene recognizable as Arthurian. The unsuspecting Arthur, trained for war from birth, heaves Excalibur from the Stone and is recognized as true king - then he is summarily arrested and brought for execution. In the original material, this takes place as Arthur accompanying his foster father, Sir Ector, to a tournament. Arthur is not a trained warrior, but rather an unsuspecting boy. This is in stark contrast to the Arthur presented in Legend of the Sword, who was inexplicably trained in Kung Fu by a Chinese man named George.

From here, the screenwriters insert an alternative narrative to the story of Arthur becoming King, in which he is narrowly saved from execution by a mysterious young woman with the power to control animals. This, combined with a daring rescue by a group of rebels, allows Arthur to escape to the heart of the resistance to Vortigern, led by Bedivere, who in this retelling is African. While the Bedwyr of the early Arthurian legend seems decidedly Welsh, this is actually somewhat in keeping with the idea presented throughout the legend that the knights of the Round Table are the best in their respective homelands. This glimmer of faithfulness is snuffed out by the introduction of the Round Table, which comes at the end of the film, as Arthur is accepting the homage of a group of - you guessed it - Vikings. Arthur’s Story historically takes place in the shadow of the Roman Empire’s collapse, in the early 500’s; Vikings did not arrive in Britain until 789 AD, but this film forsook history a while ago.

It is here that we are introduced to a supernatural force also new to the Arthurian tradition: every time Arthur touches Excalibur, he is transported into a spirit world where he is threatened by a demonic warrior who essentially appears to be a mix of the Dragonborn from Bethesda Softworks’ Skyrim and the Balrog from the Peter Jackson adaptation of The Fellowship of the Ring. This is the monster that killed his father. Despite this, the resistance launches an attack on the palace at London. They want to assassinate the king, but a body double screws it up. Despite being told “don’t shoot any arrows” several times, Bill, who is literally Petyr Baelish from Game of Thrones, shoots arrows. The end result is a bunch of George’s Kung Fu disciples holding off Vortigern’s men with their fists (against swords, mind you) as Robin Arthur and his Merry Men escape the city.

After an extraordinarily brief period of planning their next assault, like really I couldn’t even explain what happened here, they’re back at it again. The final moment regarding the Arthurian Legend, before Arthur’s eventual victory, comes when he hoists Excalibur to join the peasants revolting against their masters to place him on the throne. This is where my Star Wars comment comes in. Arthur reaches - oh wait there was a giant snake involved for a second and it killed bunch of Vortigern’s guards, and he ended up burying Excalibur in a stone pillar during the fight (Arthur had lost the sword during the London Debacle), and this allowed Arthur to reclaim the weapon - the critical moment, and he is forced to battle the demon. This Demon is his father’s killer, an evil expert swordsman with fire on his head. For five minutes, Arthur battles the Demon in a strange sequence of video game combo like moves and camera angles. It is, point for point, the same as the duel between Luke and Vader in Episode VI. This duel absolutely does not occur in any of the traditional Arthurian Material, and it feels, like many things in the film, to be a scene simply torn out of another legend and applied to Arthur. This actually makes a salient point.

The original written Arthurian Legend occurs in the 9th Century Historia Brittonum, a Welsh text written in Latin by the historian Nennius, though Arthur does appear in the 7th Century Y Gododdin by the poet Anerin. All we hear of him in these texts is of the Saxon Wars: “Then it was, that the magnanimous Arthur, with all the kings and military force of Britain, fought against the Saxons. And though there were many more noble than himself, yet he was twelve times chosen their commander, and was as often conqueror...The [Battle of Mons Badon] was a most severe contest, when Arthur penetrated to the hill of Badon. In this engagement, nine hundred and forty fell by his hand alone, no one but the Lord affording him assistance.” From here, nearly every additional tale in the Arthurian Legend comes either out of thin air or from a different cycle, worked into the Arthurian mythology. For all its cinematic flaws, Legend of the Sword simply does the same thing, mixing up the order. As a student of history, this is a frustrating decision, making the movie unwatchable. For the student of literature, film, or the casual film viewer, however, the movie is just another reworking of old material, likely a fresh breath compared to the somewhat stale series of same old same old retellings we usually see. Legend of the Sword was not a good movie, but it is hard to say that it was unfaithful to the literary tradition of Arthur. Regardless, the film does get many things “wrong”, and it is difficult to follow the narrative without rewinding, not to mention the fact that it does seem to take an awful lot from contemporary films and rework it as Arthurian.