KING ARTHUR

The tagline on KING ARTHUR reads, "The untold true story that inspired the legend." How true this actually is will be anybody's guess, but there's no denying that this is a version of Arthurian lore that has never been committed to film before.

For one thing, the story starts a bit earlier than most renditions have it, in sixth-century Britain. Arthur (Clive Owen) is not King of the Britons, but rather a half-Roman/half-Briton general of a small but fiercely loyal band of soldiers, most of them originally from Sarmatia (in what is geographically now part of Russia), who have been serving Rome in Britain for 15 years. They are due to be discharged, but an envoy from Rome, Bishop Germanius (Ivano Marescotti), tells them they are needed to do one last job getting a high-ranking Roman family to safety. It seems that the island is being invaded by the Saxons, led by Cerdic (Stellan Skarsgard), and Rome has decided to abandon this outpost of the Empire rather than losing more soldiers to keep it. This bodes ill for the locals, and even though Arthur and his men have been battling the "Woads" (an epithet derived from the Britons' practice of painting themselves with blue woad) all these years, the general is perturbed at the thought of letting them be decimated. Furthermore, many of the knights have been here so long that it feels more like home than Rome or Sarmatia. Arthur and his men wind up shepherding not only the Roman family including the thoroughly ungrateful patriarch (Ken Stott) but also the family's newly-freed-by-Arthur slaves and prisoners, including the Briton woman Guinevere (Keira Knightley). Briton leader Merlin (Stephen Dillane) urges Arthur to stay and defend the natives. When Cerdic's Saxons attack the travelers, Arthur is inclined to consider this proposal, against the advice of his best friend Lancelot (Ioan Gruffudd).

This is a decidedly unmagical rendering of the Arthur myth (unless one wants to factor in a bit about knights believed to be reincarnated as horses). Excalibur has no special powers, Merlin is neither mage nor Arthur's mentor and the whole Morgan/Mordred business is nowhere to be seen. Likewise, there is no Arthur/Guinevere/Lancelot triangle to speak of Guinevere and Lancelot share a bit of banter and a glance, but there's no actual romance between them and no rivalry between Arthur and Lancelot. The general/knight conflict here is strictly confined to the issue of staying or leaving, and since none of Arthur's small legion have seen home in 15 years and at least one Ray Winstone's earthy Bors has settled in very comfortably, it's hard for us to intellectually believe (much less feel on a visceral level) that they are genuinely homesick.

Where KING ARTHUR works fantastically is in its battle sequences. Shot ferociously by director Antoine Fuqua, with hell-for-leather horsework managed by stunt coordinator Steve Dent and brutal, impressively varied swordwork supervised by swordmaster Mark Ryan, the fights make us feel that we're in the thick of Dark Ages warfare with you-are-there intensity. A confrontation between Arthur and his people and the Saxon forces on an iced-over lake at about the midway point is truly memorable it is big, suspenseful, unusual and visually very distinctive.

The acting is also notable. It's hard to credibly play an unironic hero, but Owen truly makes us believe in his Arthur as a man of both conscience and thoughtful contemplation, compassionate and intelligent, whose personality is strong enough to command the allegiance of some very tough customers. Skarsgard is soft-spoken as the hateful but consistent villain we don't agree with his point of view, but Skarsgard and the filmmakers make sure that we understand why it makes sense to him. Knightley has conviction as the brave, understandably smitten Guinevere and Winstone gives us a very well-rounded character without much dialogue as a rabid fighter who's a more or less ordinary guy when left to his own devices. Gruffudd puts a lot of passion into his portrait of the devoted but questioning sidekick.

Where KING ARTHUR doesn't fare so well is in its narrative. There is some historical basis to at least argue that Arthur and/or some of his knights may have been Sarmatian in origin. However, this take on the story is so far from anything that anyone except some historians associate with Arthurian lore that it feels like the character names are being used for marketing value, rather than any intrinsic connection to something that already resonates with viewers. This wouldn't matter so much if the film's story worked better on its own terms. However, due to what looks like overzealous editing, KING ARTHUR moves overly quickly from setpiece to setpiece. It's not that the pacing is frenetic, exactly, but rather that the filmmakers are trying to cram in so much information that we don't really get a chance to contemplate how much of it fits together, much less stop for the kind of grace notes that allow story and characters to breathe and that perhaps might have let us contemplate how the events shown here could have been translated through time into the more familiar legends.

KING ARTHUR is good overall it's exciting, beautiful to look at and performed with energy and heart. It's just that watching it, you suspect that there's more to the world it shows than we get to see here.