King Arthur (2004 film)

King Arthur is a 2004 historical adventure film directed by Antoine Fuqua and written by David Franzoni. It features an ensemble cast with Clive Owen as the title character, Ioan Gruffudd as Lancelot and Keira Knightley as Guinevere, along with Mads Mikkelsen, Joel Edgerton, Hugh Dancy, Ray Winstone, Ray Stevenson, Stephen Dillane, Stellan Skarsgård and Til Schweiger.

King Arthur
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Antoine Fuqua
Written by	David Franzoni
Produced by	Jerry Bruckheimer
Starring	Clive Owen Keira Knightley Stellan Skarsgård Stephen Dillane Ray Winstone Hugh Dancy Til Schweiger Ioan Gruffudd
Cinematography	Slawomir Idziak
Edited by	Conrad Buff Jamie Pearson
Music by	Hans Zimmer
Production companies	Touchstone Pictures Jerry Bruckheimer Films World 2000 Entertainment Green Hills Productions
Distributed by	Buena Vista Pictures Distribution
Release date	7 July 2004 (2004-07-07)
Running time	126 minutes 142 minutes (Director's cut)
Countries	United States United Kingdom Ireland
Languages	English, Scottish Gaelic
Budget	$120 million
Box office	$203.6 million

The film is unusual in reinterpreting Arthur as a Roman officer rather than the typical medieval knight. Several literary works have also done so, including David Gemmell's Ghost King, Jack Whyte's Camulod Chronicles, and perhaps the strongest influence on this film, Bernard Cornwell's Warlord series. The producers of the film attempted to market it as a more historically accurate version of the Arthurian legends, supposedly inspired by new archaeological findings. The film also replaces the sword in the stone story with a darker and more tragic backstory of how Arthur claimed his sword Excalibur. The film was shot in Ireland, England, and Wales.

Plot

In the 5th century AD, the declining Roman Empire is withdrawing from Britannia, where the native Woads, led by Merlin, stage an insurgency. A group of Sarmatian knights and their half-British Roman commander Artorius Castus, known as "Arthur", have fulfilled their duties to Rome and are preparing to return home. Arthur himself plans to continue his career in Rome until Bishop Germanus orders them to complete one final mission: evacuate an important Roman family from north of Hadrian's Wall, saving them from an advancing army of invading Saxons led by the ruthless Cerdic and his son, Cynric. Alecto, the son of the family patriarch, is a viable candidate to be a future Pope. Arthur and his remaining men – Lancelot, Tristan, Galahad, Bors, Gawain, and Dagonet – reluctantly accept the mission.

Arriving at their destination, they find that the Roman patriarch Marius, who refuses to leave, has enslaved the local population, enraging Arthur. He discovers a cell complex containing several dead Woads and two tortured survivors — a young woman named Guinevere and her younger brother Lucan. Arthur frees them and gives Marius an ultimatum — leave with them willingly or otherwise be taken prisoner. He and his knights commandeer the homestead and liberate its exploited people. The convoy flees into the mountains with the Saxons in pursuit. Marius leads an attempted coup but is slain by Guinevere. Arthur learns from Alecto that Germanus and his fellow bishops had Arthur's childhood mentor and father figure Pelagius executed for heresy. This further disillusions Arthur with the Roman way of life, a process that matures when Guinevere and Merlin remind Arthur of his connection to the island of Britain through his Celtic mother.

Arthur leads the pursuing Saxons, led by Cynric, through a pass crossing a frozen lake. As battle ensues, Dagonet sacrifices himself to crack the lake ice with his axe, disrupting the Saxon advance. The knights safely deliver Alecto and his mother to Hadrian's wall and are officially discharged. Arthur, having concluded that his destiny lies with his mother's people, decides to engage the Saxons despite Lancelot's pleas to leave with them. The night before the battle, he and Guinevere make love, and on the following day, Arthur meets Cerdic under a white flag of parley, vowing to kill him. He is soon joined by Lancelot and his fellow knights, who decide to fight. In the climactic Battle of Badon Hill, the Woads and knights whittle the Saxon army. Guinevere engages Cynric, who overwhelms her. Lancelot aids her and kills Cynric but is fatally wounded. Cerdic kills Tristan before facing off against Arthur, who kills the Saxon leader, condemning the invaders to defeat.

Arthur and Guinevere marry and Merlin proclaims Arthur as King of the Britons. United by their defeat of the Saxons and the retreat of the Romans, Arthur promises to lead the Britons against any future invaders. Three horses that had belonged to Tristan, Dagonet, and Lancelot run free across the landscape, as the closing narrative from Lancelot describes how fallen knights live on in tales passed from generation to generation.

Cast

• Clive Owen as Arthur
• Ioan Gruffudd as Lancelot
• Mads Mikkelsen as Tristan
• Joel Edgerton as Gawain
• Hugh Dancy as Galahad
• Ray Winstone as Bors
• Ray Stevenson as Dagonet
• Keira Knightley as Guinevere
• Stephen Dillane as Merlin
• Stellan Skarsgård as Cerdic
• Til Schweiger as Cynric
• Ivano Marescotti as Bishop Germanus
• Ken Stott as Marius Honorius
• Lorenzo De Angelis as Alecto
• Sean Gilder as Jols
• Clive Russell as Lancelot's father
• Stephanie Putson as Lancelot's mother
• Pat Kinevane as Horton
• Stefania Orsola Garello as Fulcinia
• Charlie Creed-Miles as Ganis
• Graham McTavish as Roman officer
• Alan Devine as British scout
• Johnny Brennan as Lucan
• David Murray as Merlin's lieutenant
• Dawn Bradfield as Vanora
• Maria Gładkowska as Igraine
• Owen Teale as Pelagius (only in director's cut)

Production

The film was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and directed by Antoine Fuqua; David Franzoni, the writer of the original draft script for Gladiator, wrote the screenplay. The historical consultant for the film was John Matthews, an author known for his books on esoteric Celtic spirituality, some of which he co-wrote with his wife Caitlin Matthews. The research consultant was Linda A. Malcor, co-author of From Scythia to Camelot: A Radical Reinterpretation of the Legends of King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, and the Holy Grail, in which possible non-Celtic sources for the Arthurian legends are explored.

The film's main set, a replica of a section of Hadrian's Wall, was the largest film set ever built in Ireland, and was located in a field in County Kildare. The replica was one kilometre long, which took a crew of 300 building workers four and a half months to build. The fort in the film was based on the Roman fort named Vindolanda, which was built around 80 AD just south of Hadrian's Wall in what is now called Chesterholm in Northern England.

Fuqua was reportedly dissatisfied with the film which he attributed to interference by Disney. Fuqua said of the experience: “Did I get to make the movie I wanted? No and no,” he says of both versions. “I started out making the movie I wanted, but that was before they (Disney) started to police me. They said, ‘Try not to show so much blood.’ If you agree to make a gritty, dark, realistic film, then everything should be like that. I mean, it's set in the Dark Ages, when people were inconsiderate and decided to bleed everywhere.”

Relationship with Arthurian legend

Cinematic versus traditional portrayal

Guinevere's warrior persona is closer to the ancient Queen Medb (romanticised above by J. C. Leyendecker, 1911) of the Irish Táin Bó Cúailnge than the Guinevere of Arthurian legend

The film's storyline is not taken from traditional sources but is a work of creative fiction. The only notable exception to this is the inclusion of the Saxons as Arthur's adversaries and the Battle of Badon Hill. Most traditional elements of Arthurian legend are dropped, such as the Holy Grail and Tristan's lover Iseult. The film barely includes the love triangle between Arthur, Lancelot, and Guinevere; while Guinevere and Arthur are romantically involved, only a few sequences depict a possible relationship between Lancelot and Guinevere. Sir Lucan is generally described as Bedivere’s younger brother, rather than being Guinevere’s brother, as in the film.

The knights' characterizations in Arthurian legend are also dropped or altered. For example, the film's portrayal of a boorish and lusty Bors, the father of many children, differs greatly from his namesake, whose purity and celibacy allowed him to witness the Holy Grail. The cinematic portrayal of Bors is closer to the traditional depictions of Sir Kay and Sir Pellinore than to those of his legendary namesake. Lancelot and Galahad are portrayed as having similar ages in the film, though in texts like the Vulgate cycle they are father and son, respectively (the film's approach is also found in modern Arthurian fiction — such as Bernard Cornwell's The Warlord Chronicles, in which they are brothers).

The cinematic portrayal of Guinevere as a Celtic warrior who joins Arthur's knights in battle is a drastic contrast to the "damsel in distress" found in many courtly romances. Although there is historical and mythological precedent for "sword-swinging warrior queens", such as the British Boudica of the Iceni, Gwenllian ferch Gruffydd of Wales, or the various Celtic war goddesses, the film's portrayal of Guinevere is actually closer to the Queen Medb of the Irish Táin Bó Cúailnge. No source describes Guinevere as either a warrior or a rustic Celt; in fact, in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae, which contains one of the oldest accounts of the character, Guinevere has Roman blood while Arthur is an Indigenous Celt. However, in some Welsh sources, Gwenhwyfar is attributed supernatural strength; and in one later Irish text, her daughter Melora is a trained warrior; so this portrayal is not entirely without textual precedent.

Though Merlin and Tristan are thought to have originated outside of the Arthurian legends (as did Lancelot, a French interpolation added by Chrétien de Troyes in the 12th century), they are frequently included in Arthurian texts and their presence is reflective of the broader Arthurian tradition. Some other traditional characters who are featured in the film, such as Galahad, were invented later. On the other hand, some of the most prominent Arthurian characters are not featured, such as Kay and Bedivere, both of whom are prevalent in early Arthuriana.

Differences between the film and the Arthurian legend

In the film, Arthur's father is a Roman general from the Imperial Roman army and his mother is a Celtic woman. In the historical notes of the legend, Arthur's father is Uther Pendragon, a famous Romano-British commander and one of Britain's earlier kings, and his mother is Igraine, a beautiful young woman who was once the wife of Gorlois, the Duke of Cornwall and one of Uther's loyal subjects.

Arthur's knights are described differently in the film and the legend. In the film, Lancelot, Tristan, Bors and the other Knights of the Round Table are Sarmatian knights fighting for the glory of the Roman Empire. In historical notes, the Knights of the Round Table are Britons, knights of Romano-Celtic Britain fighting for the freedom of Britain against the Saxons. A round table is briefly present in the movie, where Arthur's knights regularly meet in equality, and which flummoxes bishop Germanus when he cannot find a place at the table to distinguish his stature.

Other references to Arthurian legend

Dagonet, a self-sacrificing warrior in the film, has Arthur's court jester as his namesake. The character appears in Le Morte d'Arthur and Idylls of the King. Also in the film, Lancelot fights using two swords. This may be a reference to the ill-fated Sir Balin, the "Knight with Two Swords", but this epithet refers to his cursed sword rather than his fighting style. Sir Palamedes is also sometimes noted for carrying two swords.

Tristan has a pet hawk, which may be a reference to Le Morte d'Arthur, in which Tristan is noted as being skilled at falconry.

The role of the traitor, often ascribed to Mordred, is given a smaller part in the form of a young British scout, played by Alan Devine, who betrays his people to the Saxons. The character is unnamed but called "British Scout" in the credits. Tristan kills the traitor with an arrow from the other side of Hadrian's Wall during the climactic battle.

Relationship with other works

Italian historian and novelist Valerio Massimo Manfredi claimed that the movie was almost a plagiarism of his 2002 novel The Last Legion, due to several similarities between the two works. These similarities include the reuse of some tropes and happenings present in the book and, especially, the attempt to give historical reliability to the main characters with the concept of King Arthur having Roman origins. Indeed, the events of the movie suggest a theory that is largely different from the one on which Manfredi's novel is based, in which Artorius Castus isn't even mentioned, and neither is the Sarmatian auxiliary army. According to Manfredi, King Arthur's release and its commercial failure were among the main causes of the problems related to the movie adaptation of his novel, which was in development hell until its release in 2007.

Reception

Box office

King Arthur grossed $15 million on its opening weekend in third place behind Spider-Man 2 and Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy. It eventually grossed $51.9 million in the United States and Canada and $151.7 million in other territories for a worldwide total of $203.6 million, against a production budget of $120 million.

Critical response

On Rotten Tomatoes King Arthur has an approval rating of 31% based on 190 reviews being positive with the critics consensus being "The magic is gone, leaving a dreary, generic action movie". On Metacritic the film has a score of 46 out of 100 based on reviews from 41 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". David Edelstein of Slate called the film "profoundly stupid and inept" and added, "it's an endless source of giggles once you realise that its historical revisionism has nothing to do with archeological discoveries and everything to do with the fact that no one at Disney would green-light an old-fashioned talky love triangle with a hero who dies and an adulterous heroine who ends up in a nunnery." A. O. Scott of the New York Times further remarked that the film was "a blunt, glowering B picture, shot in murky fog and battlefield smoke, full of silly-sounding pomposity and swollen music (courtesy of the prolifically bombastic Hans Zimmer). The combat scenes, though boisterous and brutal, are no more coherent than the story, which requires almost as much exposition as the last Star Wars film. Luckily there is an element of broad, brawny camp that prevents King Arthur from being a complete drag."

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times had a more positive response to the film and awarded it three out of four stars, writing, "That the movie works is because of the considerable production qualities and the charisma of the actors, who bring more interest to the characters than they deserve. There is a kind of direct, unadorned conviction to the acting of Clive Owen and the others; raised on Shakespeare, trained for swordfights, with an idea of Arthurian legend in their heads since childhood, they don't seem out of time and place like the cast of Troy. They get on with it."

Robin Rowland criticised critics who criticized the film for its Dark Age setting. Rowland pointed out that several Arthurian novels are set in the Dark Ages, like Rosemary Sutcliff's Sword at Sunset and Mary Stewart's Merlin trilogy (The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills and The Last Enchantment). However, these works have little in common with the film's story and Sarmatian angle. In response to criticism of the setting, a consultant on the film Linda A. Malcor said: "I think these film-makers did a better job than most could have done when it comes to giving us something besides knights in tin foil and damsels in chiffon.... [they] deserve a lot of praise for the effort that they made." Fellow Arthurian scholar Geoffrey Ashe's opinion was unfavorable.

Later director Antoine Fuqua said:

“When I first signed on to the movie it was to shoot an R movie, and then halfway through it - that changed, for all sorts of reasons. Obviously, it's always money...That was very difficult for me and I had a tough time adjusting to that. I had to change a lot of my shooting style that I had set up because it just wouldn't have been possible to do certain things and get a PG-13 rating, just because it would have been more graphic. Like I said, tonally, I had a whole different mindset. So once that happened, while I was filming, it made it difficult.“

Director's cut

An unrated director's cut of the film was released; it has extra footage of battle scenes as well as more scenes between Lancelot and Guinevere, whose traditional love triangle with Arthur is only hinted at in the theatrical version. The battle scenes are also bloodier and more graphic.

Several scenes are also omitted from the director's cut, including one where the knights sit around a campfire asking about their intended Sarmatian life, in which Bors reveals that his children do not even have names, most simply have numbers. In addition, a sex scene between Guinevere and Arthur is shifted to be chronologically before he is informed of the incoming Saxons towards Hadrian's Wall. This seemingly minor change arguably helps the story flow more smoothly. In the original film, he is seen in full battle armour, contemplating a broken image of Pelagius on his floor, and then is disturbed by a call to come outside. When he comes outside, he is hastily putting on a shirt, and his hair is disheveled. In the Director's Cut, after an intimate moment between Arthur and Guinevere explaining Arthur's morals, they carry on into their sexual encounter and are thus disturbed so that Arthur can be briefed on the Saxons. During the sexual encounter, he is wearing the same outfit he wears during the briefing. The scene where he is examining Pelagius's image is removed.

Marketing

Despite these many drastic diversions from the source material (including the Welsh Mabinogion), the producers of the film attempted to market it as a more historically accurate version of the Arthurian legends. Other liberties were taken with the actors' appearances: Keira Knightley's breasts were digitally enlarged for the US theatrical film poster.

Video game

Main article: King Arthur (video game)

See also

• List of films based on Arthurian legend
• List of historical drama films

External links

• King Arthur at IMDb
• King Arthur at AllMovie
• King Arthur at the TCM Movie Database
• King Arthur at the AFI Catalog of Feature Films
• King Arthur at Box Office Mojo
• King Arthur at Rotten Tomatoes