King Arthur
Knights, Action, & Colonization

2,237 words

In “They Don’t Make Them Like They Used To,” Angelo Plume’s paean to the film First Knight, he gives us a blow-by-blow account of the film, lamenting that such films don’t get made anymore.  Sad but true for the West. After reading the review, I had my Saturday night pizza, popped open a beer (Sam Adams), and dug into my archives to watch King Arthur, the 2004 film about the once and future king; decidedly different than First Knight, but it has its own flavor and goes very good with popcorn . . . and mead.

This King Arthur,  produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and directed by Antoine Fuqua, offers a different take on the Arthur legend. Like First Knight, we see no magic or fairies nor godly visions. We’re in  fourth-century Roman Britain just as it is closing down. The Saxons are east, seeping down through the island like evil lava. Bishop Germanius (Ivano Morescott), needs to pluck out Alecto (Lorenzo De Angelis), the son of Marius, and send him to Rome, where he is much needed and admired. The problem is, Marius’s estate is a shrinking island in the Saxon flood waters. Germanius needs the Roman equivalent of a SEAL team for extraction.

That is where Artorius (Clive Owen) comes in. A knight leading a team of ruthless and well-trained fellows, he meets Germanius. He demands his men now be offered their freedom, as promised. The knights, all plucked from Sarmatia as boys years ago, trained and fighting as Roman cavalry, want to go home. Germanius agrees, holding scrolls proclaiming their freedom.

But, he smiles like a Papist Karl Rove, there is one more mission they must accomplish. Bring Alecto to safety, and freedom is theirs. The scrolls are offered like enticing egg rolls. And if they refuse? If they take French leave?

Well, they have to go through the empire to get home, and they would be hunted men. Talk about an offer you can’t refuse.

The knights, chief among them Lancelot (Ioan Gruffudd) and a boisterous and very sexually prolific Bors (Ray Winstone) don’t like this. Flashbacks opening the film show the knights as boys taken from the Sarmatian plains to be herded into the Roman army (which was historically accurate: Rome took a lot of children to impress them into servitude to keep the obedience of their families). Artorius convinces them to do one for the Gipper, and they’re off.

So, this is a a standard action film plot: the tough but comradely set of warriors ready to do the final mission. It recalls dozens of films, with a whiff of Saving Private Ryan. Certainly the script, written by David Franzoni, recalls the themes of Gladiator, his Oscar-nominated screenplay.

Its strength relies on the action, atmosphere, and characters. Artorius holds the team and film together. Let’s call him Arthur, because that’s who he is. He’s also not Sarmatian but a Briton. As a child, he was not forced into Roman service, but courted by Rome’s civilizing influence and the spiritual strength of Christianity as represented by Pelagius, the Welsh monk who argued man’s need for free will, not St. Augustine’s dictum of man’s complete sinfulness and obedience to God. Arthur wants to be free of soldiering to go to Rome and be with Pelagius. Rome and Christ are his family.

We cut to the Saxons, where a local woman is being raped by a Saxon warrior. He is stopped by the quiet, kingly, but ominous authority of Cerdic (a somberly effective Stellan Skarsgard). He kills the warrior because he won’t allow his men to pollute their purity by mixing with the natives. The Saxons are a race that will not defile themselves. They aren’t here to blend in. They’re here to conquer. The woman tearfully thanks Cerdic. He shrugs then has her killed.

Her village is also burned to the ground, as all in Britain are. Saxons will build back better.

While this seems cruel and perhaps a dig at Aryan supremacy, Cerdic offers cold if rough logic. A conquering race must have nothing to with inferior peoples. Take the example of America: in North America, the English settlers set out to recreate their own race, culture, and mores. There was never any real effort to blend in with the Indians, except by a very few whites on the fringe. It was them or us. In Latin America, the Spanish and Portuguese joined with the Indians to create a Mestizo world. The results are before us.

Cerdic and his army roll on, but he is a gamesman, seeking, as he says, a real man to fight. Arthur is that man, and the film gradually draws them to each other, two worldviews ready to clash.

But what is Arthur’s worldview? It begins a Roman one, and the tension of the subplot is how he is shown that his British side will win out over the artificial, Roman one.

Merlin is the first tempter, but Arthur is too wary. A better intellectual adversary is Guinevere (Keira Knightley). She confronts him in a firm but un-hostile manner, asking him to explain his loyalty to Rome.

Arthur does so, as well as the necessity of his mission. He rescued her from a dungeon used by monks to torture pagans who won’t convert. Pulling Guinevere from a pit, he also resets her shattered fingers, an act of mercy. But since Guinevere is an archer, there is a utility in his mercy; he is slowly preparing fighters for the showdown with Cerdic.

The film dispenses with the medieval trappings and hagiography that envelop the Arthurian legend and instead makes it a meditation on colonization; both colonizer and native are at odds, and Arthur is uniquely placed in both worlds, as a leader of his knights and devotee of Pelagius and the Roman world.

His knights occupy this netherworld as well; not as spiritual, Christian knights, but as men who, as boys, were taken from their native land of Sarmatia to become Roman soldiers, bound to serve Rome so their families would maintain loyalty to the conquerer.

They fight well. In an early battle, the arrival of Germanius is swamped by Woads, the native Britons. Arthur and his knights charge to the rescue, saving Germanius, who cleverly hid himself among the soldiers, leaving a decoy in his wagon for the Woads to slaughter. Germanius is proud of his cunning. Arthur less so, but Germanius is a bishop, he is Rome, and so…

In the thick forest beyond Roman rule, Merlin, leader of the Woads, keeps planning. In this film he is not a wizard or warrior but the leader of the resistance against Rome . . . a kind of Sitting Bull . . . the spiritual and intellectual center of the Woads’ armed struggle. He and the Woads also note the gathering Saxon invasion on the horizon. He also notes Arthur has fought bravely but also spared a Woad when he could have killed him.

We see the world of Britain not as Plume noted in First Knight as a battle between kingdoms of Malagant and Arthur, whose hold on power is spiritually strong but physically more tenuous.

In King Arthur, the colonial struggle reminds me of the 1980 play The Romans in Britain by Howard Brenton, which I saw in London. It was controversial because of its profanity, onstage nudity, male rape, and Brenton’s parallels between Rome conquering Britain and U.K. Forces in Northern Ireland.

The colonial struggle isn’t entirely a contemporary interpretation.

Vergil’s Roman epic the Aeneid is a story of colonization as Aeneas, receiving a holy mission from the goddess Venus, takes the surviving Trojans with him to colonize (conquer) the Latins.

The basic argument as the film develops is whether Arthur will remain Roman or return to his native roots.

When Arthur welcomes Germanius to his fort, the knights join him at their round table. Germanius frowns: Why is it round? A table should be square, with a place at top for the leader. A round table implies equality. Exactly, Arthur says.

But equality isn’t Roman or really Christian. The circle recalls symbols like the ouroboros, the snake swallowing its tail, foretelling death and rebirth. Christian thought is linear, where all spiritual life is directed to waiting for the return of Christ. Arthur’s stand for equality is partly influenced by Pelagius. A bad influence, Germanius argues.

So Arthur, by his round table subtly displays a Christian/pagan conflict. It smells of heresy, but Germanius needs Arthur and his knights. When alone, he takes a clay medallion Pelagius gave the youthful Arthur and smashes it. Pelagius is, after all, a heretic.

His original name was also Morgan. A Welshman. Arthur, while seeking the Christian god and the civilization Rome offers, is conflicted, but not incapable of action. He fulfills his mission to save Alecto, yet complicates things when his party enters Marius’s estate. Marius, like Germanius, is Roman and speaks with a European accent. The is clearly a colonizer. Arthur talks like his men.

At Marius’s estate serfs toil, and Arthur doesn’t like this. Like Shakespeare, he’s always on the side of the hunted. He orders Marius to leave with Alecto. Marius can’t. He has his property, serfs, Roman order set in the British wilds. Rome (and Arthur) have come to protect him.

Arthur lets Marius know that the Saxons are on their way, and soon Marius will be the ruler of nothing.

All well and good, then Arthur orders the serfs to accompany the expedition, because they would be slaughtered.

Lancelot protests at this complication. He is a strong, virile, wise spokesman for the knights. “Get Alecto out. Do the mission”. Lancelot’s faith is not in God but the military strength of the knights in completing their mission and winning their freedom.

The knights — Lancelot, Bors, Gawain, Galahad and the rest — fight not for Rome or glory or gain, but, finally, for Arthur and themselves. Like any military unit, their true loyalty is to one another.

Meanwhile, a recovering Guinevere keeps questioning Arthur. Why does he believe what he believes? Why seek a rich (intellectual) life in Rome when there’s a country here and people who need him? His own people.

Guinevere is always logical, never defiant. Her logic awakes his passion for her. Before she becomes Venus, she is Athena.

I’m impressed with the cinematography, using haunted, rich woodlands and overcast skies symbolizing a land at war, unsure of itself. In Game of Thrones, “Winter is Coming“ is the refrain. In this film, winter is already here.

There is a stark battle as Arthur and his train escape a pursuing Saxon force by traveling on an iced over river, then turn to fight the enemy on it as it begins to spider and crack. I’m sure Ridley Scott studied this ice battle when he filmed his Napoleon.

In the final battle, Guinevere dons blue paint and fights. This is historically accurate, as British women did fight beside their husbands.

It recalls Queen Boudicca taking on the Romans.

Keira is a versatile actress and can do romance and action. When she was shooting Pride and Prejudice, between scenes she worked on martial arts stances and weapons preparing for the film Domino. In battle she uses her bow to deadly effect, but when she goes one on one, she gets knocked down, which should please readers of First Knight who complained about kick-ass women in these films. One Saxon warrior is killed by a woman, but only because a trio of them pile on him like a pack of fems at a pro-abortion demo. That’s believable.

King Arthur concludes with Arthur and Guinevere’s wedding taking place by the sea, symbolic because Pelagius was born by the sea, so the wedding symbolizes the unity of Arthur’s Christian/Roman view of equality with Britain’s unity.

It is, of course, only temporary, for that bright sea also will bring more Saxons. In the end, they will conquer, then England and Anglo-Saxon life will begin . . . until the Normans land. And now . . . Muslims? The ouroboros of conquest.

What this film emphasizes is the eternal nature of heroism. Arthur will forever inspire men. His Sarmatian knights may not return home to their liberty, but becoming mythic is true, eternal liberty.

Even Bors, with his eleven children, casts a jest at the Arthurian Bors, whose chastity allowed him to see the Holy Grail. We’re reminded that human reality is molded to prolong the myth where a rough historical situation breeds heroes who inspire.

It recalls Rembrandt’s painting of The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis, depicting Batavians swearing an oath of rebellion against Rome. The Dutch leaders thought it too rough and lacked decorum to properly display heroic Dutch ancestors, but Rembrandt wanted them to look coarse, rough, men of the dark and firelight oaths taken by sword. This is what we were, Rembrandt seemed to say; freedom and rebellion are rough. Liberty isn’t delicate.

Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, The Conspiracy of Claudius Civilis, circa 1661 – 1662

King Arthur, with its solid emphasis on European and British themes, is remarkable in that has an all-white cast, having been directed by Antoine Fuqua, a Nigerian, much like Ride With the Devil, the ultimate film on the Civil War in Missouri, was directed by Ang Lee. Certainly it was an ironic that two non-white men re-created a  solid white world in their films, more so than the P.C. control of Hollywood or the BBC would or could have done.

For a popcorn movie, you could do a lot worse.