I’m not sure this is the right title for this film. I’m still looking for the right one, but so far I’ve only come up with these two:

  Conan Versus the Nasty Saxons
  Snow White and the Six Sarmatians

You may guess that I am less than enchanted with this film.

We are alerted at the beginning to the fact that this film is not based on the hero who was medievalized by Mallory and romanticized by Tennyson, but on “recent archaeological developments”, i.e. on well-known Celtic sources that predated Mallory and from whom he basically borrowed, updated and organized his material. Well, perhaps loosely based would be a better term for the process. Or even invented out of whole cloth by David Franzoni, who thought he could do it better than Mallory or de Troyes.

We start with a group of six Sarmatian kids conscripted off the steppe into the Roman army of the mid-fifth century and sent off to Britain, where they grow up to become six knights ⁽¹⁾ under command of one Arthur Custis (or so I heard the name; it certainly wasn’t “Pendragon” or “Penddraig”), played by Clive Owen. Fifteen years older, they’re supposed to get their walking papers from Roman Bishop Germanius (Ivano Marescotti), but he arrives and gives them one more mission — go north of Hadrian’s wall to rescue the Bishop’s godson Alecto (Lorenzo de Angelis) and his parents from an advancing army of Saxons, after which they will be allowed to go free. To do this, Arthur and his men have to plow through country occupied by the rebellious “woads”, presumably Britons, who apparently have a romantic longing for the free Britain, such as it was, that Claudius conquered four hundred years earlier and who have gone north of the Wall to paint themselves blue, get rid of all but enough clothes to make their women just suitable for a PG-13 certification, eat bad food and live in the rain, which indeed is pretty much what the pre-Roman Britons (at least the stupider ones) may have done. Picts are not mentioned; as a descendant of Picts myself, I presume that they were all sitting around outside the range of the cameras and laughing their Pictish heads off at these Roman, Briton and Sarmatian fools. Anyway, Arthur rescues this family, not to mention Guinevere (the marvellous Keira Knightley, here wasting her talents in return for a big check), the woad prisoner they were holding, and escapes south again, where, instead of setting off for Rome or points east, he and his “knights” hang around long enough for him to whup about six million saxons, with some help from the woads, and to mary Guinevere in a seaside ceremony held among standing stones by the woad leader Merlin (Stephen Dillane). End of story.

I wish I could list all the things I found nonsensical about this movie. First were the subplots, none of which ever amounted to anything (what was all that with Tristam’s falcon? there’s a hint of the Arthur-Lancelot-Guinevere triangle, but it is stillborn, as Lancelot (Ioan Gruffudd, last year Captain Horatio Hornblower, next year Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four) — who is putatively narrating the story — gets killed well before it has a chance to evolve, one of the most basic blunders to be made in a first-person story). The “round table” is a big conference table that will be abandoned in the room at the Wall. The Saxons, who are, I suspect, far more nasty than the original Saxons ever were — the originals didn’t start out by invading Britain, by the way; they were invited in by one side in the local wars that followed the Roman departures — and they had evidently all read Mein Kampf before leaving Germany, since their leader Cerdic (Stellan Skarsgaard) babbles on about racial purity and kills one of his men for trying to have his wicked way with a local woman, after which he orders her killed, too — not a very realistic portrayal, I think. He isn’t quite bright, either; after seeing half his army get chewed into sausage by a Roman, six Sarmations and a bunch of blue-painted women, he thinks to himself: “Wow, that was bad. Well, maybe the other half can do better,” and sends _them_ in to be chewed into sausage. He also seems to be an abusive father to his son Cynric (Til Schweiger), who should, to be dramatically consistent, have taken his revenge somewhere in the movie, but never did …

There is also a religious subplot that is perhaps a little better developed — but in what direction, I’m not quite sure. Though Alecto — who is supposed to become a great religious leader in the future — never amounts to anything, Arthur’s preoccupation with the Christian philosopher Pelagius is interesting, especially when he finds out that Pelagius has been excommunicated by the Church and murdered by Germanius’s co-thinkers, after which Arthur decides to cast his lot with the Britons (and with Keira Knightley — who can blame him?). The objective viewer might come away from this film imagining that it is anti-Christian. Well, perhaps “imagining” isn’t the proper word …

And what was all that with the sword? In one scene, Arthur pulls it out of his father’s grave (the “stone” of legend); in another scene, I hear him say that it was never there in the first place because his father, a peace-loving man, didn’t want a sword stuck in his grave.

Colorful, fast-moving, good battle scenes. Bors, who has a local mistress and eleven kids who are at least putatively his, and who often thinks about taking them all with him back to Sarmatia, is an interesting character, unlike any of the others. And this is, I think, about the limit of the faint praise that I can come up with.

⁽¹⁾ These are not actually “knights”, either the “chevaliers” of the Middle Ages or the “equites” of old Roman times, both of which groups consisted of wealthy men who more-or-less volunteered for the job, and brought their upper-class money and attitudes with them. From their behavior, they are more like well-trained mounted infantry, who mainly use their horses to get to the battle and then jump onto the ground to participate in the carnage Roman plate armor apparently being made of aluminum and so allowing you to jump off your horse rather than be helped down with a winch. “Grunts” is the modern English term. Arthur, who is in charge of these six guys, would probably be referred to in modern parlance as a “corporal”.

NOTE: One interesting thought came to mind while I was watching this film. Arthur is basically a pseudo-historical character — no one is absolutely sure that he ever lived, either as Über-King or as tribal warlord. There has never been a historical King Arthur of England or Britain, but there have been several princes of that name, one of whom is still extant. If a Prince Arthur should ever assume the throne, would he be styled Arthur or Arthur II???