Ok, everyone add this film, King Arthur: Director's Cut to the top of your netflix queue or go rent it or even buy it. I'll wait.
This is perhaps one of the best interpretations of the Camelot Myth I have yet to see—and I'm a big old Broadway Musicals kind of fag.
Seriously. Keira Knightly, a stunning and capable Guinevere and Clive Owen as Arthur—that's a lot of human beauty in one frame. It's as bloody and violent as 300, but with, like, a plot and everything. Having never seen fifth century sword battles I cannot say how realistic it was, but it sure drove the point home (no pun intended).
The knights swagger, but with a noble humility. Fight with vigor, but only out of necessity. There is honor and bravery, ethics and moxie.
And there is some truly exquisite dialog. I transcribed (well, retyped from the blu-ray disc's “English for the Hearing Impaired” subtitles) the scene in which Arthur, a loyal soldier of a Rome he had believed was the pinnacle of civilization. Guinevere, a native Briton (and mighty talented with the bow), attempts to pull him back from the crisis he suffers when he realizes the corruption of Rome and that his version of Rome no longer existed:
A grave with no sword.
ARTHUR
It was my father's wish that if he died on this island, he would be buried with his knights.
GUINEVERE
He died in battle?
ARTHUR
It's a family tradition.
GUINEVERE
I can see why you believe you have nothing left here—except what you and your knights have done. You have your deeds—
ARTHUR
Deeds in themselves are meaningless unless they're for some higher purpose. We have waged a war to protect a Rome that does not exist. Is that the deed I am to be judged by?
GUINEVERE
You stayed and fought when you didn't have to. You bloodied evil men when you could have run. You did all that for no reason?
ARTHUR
Pelagius once told me “There is no worse death than the end of Hope.”
GUINEVERE
You and I are not the polite people that live in poems! We are blessed and cursed by our times.
ARTHUR
Perhaps the curse is of our own making. And the blessing.
•••
But you and I are not the polite people that live in poems. Honesty, honor, candor, decency, nobility, ethics. These are all on my mind lately, if you hadn't noticed. I hope they're not gone forever from the fore. The death of that hope I might never recover from.
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