10 Things I Thought While Watching “King Arthur”

by Gabriel Valdez

1. Ah, King Arthur. It takes a special dedication to make a movie so inaccurate when it’s based on events no one can agree on because they never happened. This is what Antoine Fuqua (Training Day, The Equalizer) made when his Strangers on a Train remake fell through. It’s too bad. Denzel would’ve killed that. Instead, Fuqua took over for King Arthur after Michael Bay left. How well does a film designed for Michael Bay marry with the sensibilities of the guy who directed Training Day? Pretty much how you’d expect.

2. Look, writer David Franzoni had to cash in on his Gladiator cred somehow after Gladiator 2 failed to get off the ground. King Arthur would be his last screenplay, however. Of Gladiator‘s two other writers, William Nicholson would hit a dry spell until 2007’s Elizabeth: The Golden Age.

John Logan, who essentially reworked the Gladiator screenplay into the film we know and love, would be the only writer to build his career off the Oscar-winning film. After a bumpy run through The Time Machine and Star Trek: Nemesis, he hit his stride with The Last Samurai, The Aviator, Sweeney Todd, Rango (I’d argue his best work), and Hugo. He’d then regress (all the way to the bank) on Skyfall and is now the go-to James Bond writer.

3. The cast here is ridiculous, especially in retrospect. Clive Owen is King Arthur, Ioan Gruffudd is Lancelot, Keira Knightley is Guinevere. Also featured are Mads Mikkelsen, Joel Edgerton, Hugh Dancy, Ray Winstone, Ray Stevenson, and Stellan Skarsgard. Unfortunately, how they’re used is also ridiculous. Arthur and his knights are enslaved Roman soldiers. Knightley is a Boudica analogue who will slice your throat unless there’s a handsome protagonist nearby, at which point she gets awful short of breath and goes all Wuthering Heights on you. Merlin’s her Celtic chieftain, and everyone’s running from Ray Winstone and his army of Saxons.

4. Poor Ray Winstone. Always the villain leading an evil army. I like to think that he has a real life army devoted solely to him, and even when he’s not playing an evil general, they follow him onto set in homemade costumes anyway. They watch Noah and cheer for him, and hang photos of Winstone above their fireplace so they can pray for vengeance on fools and knaves every night. You know what I’d like to see? A buddy comedy starring Ray Winstone, Sean Bean, Mark Strong, and Ben Kingsley. You know, like Wild Hogs, only good. Jack McBrayer plays the villain.

5. That’s pretty annoying, Ioan Gruffudd, I’m fairly certain Keira Knightley could’ve axed that guy in the face all on her own. King Arthur likes to pretend it’s on the side of Guinivere being a badass, but really, she only gets to be a badass when she’s in flowing, idyllic robes or in her Celtic stripper uniform (all the men wear anachronistic, full plate armor). Her costuming subscribes to a virgin/whore dichotomy and she ends up marrying whoever lives out of the Arthur/Lancelot duo. At least Camelot is about an affair Guinevere can enjoy. Here, Guinevere’s just a prize for the victor.

6. Knightley’s always been intriguing to me. King Arthur may include her worst performance, but that can be said for much of its cast. The very first Pirates of the Caribbean had come out a year earlier, and when she was engaged for the sequel in 2006, she insisted that the film include swordfighting scenes for her Elizabeth Swann. Hence, she got a barfight and was as crucial (and capable) a part of the climactic beach battle as Orlando Bloom and Johnny Depp.

7. Some of these shots are ridiculous. Clive Owen comes riding out on his mighty steed, from the gate of Hadrian’s Wall. Never mind that it’s a pretty thin wall when it comes to military fortifications, and since the Romans have abandoned the whole thing, the Saxons could just avoid what they know is a trap, trot a few miles down the road, and bind up a few ladders to cross over it.

8. One more thing on this dumb wall: when Owen comes riding out, you can’t see the fields and buildings that are supposed to be beyond the gate. No greenery, no matte backdrop. There’s no existence, no sign of all the Roman facilities we saw earlier. I get that the wall set is built in a completely different place than the Roman settlement set is, but not having what would’ve been ten feet worth of backdrop to connect the two is just lazy. Through the gate you can only see very artificial blackness and fog. It’s like Gandalf recollecting a Saruman warning: “Hadrian’s Wall…You fear to go into England. The Romans delved too greedily and too deep. You know what they awoke in the darkness of Bowness-on-Solway…blackness and fog.”

9. The fight choreography in this leaves much to be desired. The stunt coordination of larger battle scenes isn’t bad, but when it gets to the one-on-one fights, half of the Celt choreography is to spin 360 degrees for no reason whatsoever. The Saxons, meanwhile, never bother to take advantage of their enemies’ unprotected backsides. They wait for the Celts to get done spinning, at which point the Celt swings his axe willy-nilly, the Saxon kind of stands there looking at it, and everyone’s suddenly surprised it’s buried in his lung. “We are defeated, my lord. The Celts – we had no idea they might spin!”

10. If you’re looking for a better version of this, go with Neil Marshall’s far more badass Centurion, which stars Michael Fassbender and Olga Kurylenko. It has nothing to do with King Arthur, but it’s a better movie about Roman soldiers in ancient Britain who are abandoned beyond the wall by an untrustworthy empire. It’s more focused, has spots of gorgeous cinematography that stick in my head, and includes a rather poignant twist – which is rare in an historical action movie:

Neil Marshall also made this educational documentary about life in Scotland starring Rhona Mitra.

EDIT: It’s been brought to my attention that Stellan Skarsgard actually played the leader of the villainous Saxons, and Ray Winstone played one of Arthur’s knights. My mistake. I maintain everything else I say about Ray Winstone cult worship. Skarsgard probably just got the Ray Winstone Army as a loan by promising some sort of blood oath or firstborn or Daniel Craig’s autograph.

The Profound Journey of “X-Men: Days of Future Past”

The X-Men are mutant superheroes who each boast different abilities. In the world of X-Men: Days of Future Past, mutants are discriminated against and hunted relentlessly by robots called Sentinels. It is in this future that the few remaining survivors invent a desperate method to send one of their own back through time to try and change history.

The X-Men were created in a 1963 comic as a reflection of Martin Luther King’s and Malcolm X’s struggle to end the segregation of African-Americans in the U.S. The wheelchair-bound Professor X was the MLK figure who favored peace and passive resistance, while Magneto was the Malcolm X analogue who believed equality would only be earned through more violent means.

John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965, Robert Kennedy and King in 1968. We may look at civil rights now as a story of achievement removed from its images of suffering and struggle, we may be told by commentators with airtime to fill that it was a bloodless progression that ended racism in America, but such is the neglect of history that 50 years’ time can lend our worst moments.

Days of Future Past understands that cycles of violence are how history is defined and, as we become more efficient at killing each other, moving beyond this infinite downward spiral may be the only way we survive as a species. In the past Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) is sent to change, Magneto (Michael Fassbender) is imprisoned deep underneath the Pentagon, accused of the assassination of JFK. Wolverine’s mission is to stop sometimes-villain Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) from a botched assassination attempt on a mutant hunter name Trask (Peter Dinklage), who invents the Sentinels. Even the climax involves the potential assassination of Richard Nixon, and the risk of an even worse future than the one from which Wolverine is sent.

It’s a complex plot handled deftly, based on one of the original comics and fusing the X-Men trilogy’s cast with the rebooted X-Men: First Class cast. Days of Future Past has a lot of story to tell, but it strikes a fine balance – its action scenes each twist the screws on the plot tighter, while its dialogue scenes subtly hint at characters growing into the decisions that will effect the plot later.

The past and future timelines also allow a style of simultaneous action that is often forgotten in today’s movies. In the service of realism, we usually see one action sequence at a time. This can be important in a movie like Raiders of the Lost Ark, when Indiana Jones leaps from truck to truck. All the tension is in the physical performance and choreography. On the other hand, consider the climax of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. Three very different battles take place simultaneously: a ground war on Endor; a fleet battle in space; and an intimate duel between the hero and villain. The tension is in the hands of the editor. In Raiders, we have to believe Indiana Jones can do everything he’s doing, that every punch is connecting, so we never cut away. In Jedi, the outcome of every individual battle relies upon the next. Cutting away ratchets up the tension.

Days of Future Past uses the latter approach, taking advantage of its dual timelines beautifully. Because Wolverine’s consciousness travels through time, and not his entire body, in order for Wolverine to save the world in the past, his friends have to keep him alive in the future. In order for his friends to stay alive in the future, Wolverine has to change the past. From an action standpoint, it’s an emotionally charged choice – some characters die more than once and, for the first time in a long time, I saw a superhero movie in which I couldn’t be sure who would survive.

That timeline cycle is built from if-then relationships. If one situation worsens, so does the other, which worsens the former, and so on. From a conceptual standpoint, it’s an emotionally challenging choice. It confronts the viewer with yet another infinite downward spiral, a narrative one, and the only way to break it is to break the cycle of violence that started it. In the end, we’re not rooting for any hero to save the day. We’re rooting for humanity to be better than we have been, to improve and make a far better choice than we have before, to let the cycle of violence go.

X-Men: Days of Future Past is rated PG-13 for violence, brief nudity, and language.