The director could have used an extraordinary, legendary tale about a powerful man and his noble knights, but instead, he decided to take a more realistic look at the tale of King Arthur. The result is a movie that just isn't as interesting as the actual story. It turns out a soldier of the Roman Empire was assigned to protect the island of Britain from the Woads, a fierce group of warriors native to the land who fought to free their land from Roman rule. This soldier was called Arturius, or Arthur. One such Arthur decides that he cannot abandon Britain to the vile Saxon's, and refuses to return to Rome. Noble? Of course it is. Is it exciting? Sometimes. Is it anything as epic as the Arthur that everyone knows and loves? Not even close.
Nothing about this movie matches at all what I had in mind for the characters, dialogue, setting, anything at all. Clive Owen is dimunitive as Arthur, who I always pictured as a large, powerful man who would crush his foes. At times in this movie, he can be heard to separate from the rest of his knights. He does speak with authority, but in his Roman armor, he looks just like so many other movie characters. I always pictured his Knights of the Round Table as a noble, dignified group, standing tall, proud and bright. The knights in this movie seem like a rag tag group of farmers thrown together to go to a fight. Granted, it helps in telling them apart, but that doesn't even matter since the knights do not figure into the story at all. Lancelot has virtually no good scenes, and wastes one of the best characters in Arthurian legend. Guinevere is my biggest concern, who in this movie, is a Woad, and quite untamed. She runs wildly throughout the battlefield half naked with face paint and gasping with some sort of sexual delight each time she kills a man. It's downright creepy, and a far departure from the graceful Guinevere of the myth. And last but not least, we have Merlin, who here is nothing but a preacher, rather than a powerful wizard.
The villain of the movie has no motive, no personality and no face. He just pops up from time to time, mutters a few evil lines about death, and then disappears until the battle comes. And that's the true downfall of the movie, it has no personality. We've seen tales of Roman soldiers too many times by now. But how many times have we seen the true tale of King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table? The answer is none, because each movie tries to focus on a different aspect of it, and it ends up demeaning the overall magic of the tale. Perhaps movie directors should get it right before they try to do something different. I want to see Arthur bid his knight to toss Excalibur into the lake as he lay dying, and watch the arm reach out of the water and take it. I want to see the King Arthur that truly is a legend.