My Reflections on “Excalibur”
Yesterday I reposted Rebecca Fisher’s Big Worlds on Small Screens look at the ’80s cult classic, Excalibur. (Reposted because muggins here inadvertently scheduled two posts simultaneously last Wednesday: duh!)
So if you haven’t checked it out already, do so now! 😉
I think of all the films and shows Rebecca has reviewed over several years of Big Worlds on Small Screens, Excalibur is probably the film that was among the most formative for me. I’m not sure how it would stack up on a rewatch but I first saw it when I was quite young and despite the violence — and it is very violent — I really loved it.
I loved the way it juxtaposed a sense of gritty reality comprised of genuine dirt and Dark Ages squalor, the brutality, and the outright venality of many of the people, with a layering of myth, legend, and magic — for example, the interweaving of the mythic Fisher King with the Grail quest: i.e. “the King and the Land are One.”
I really liked the larger-than-life characters such as Merlin, Morgana, and Lancelot, as well as the colour and splendour of the Round Table — and the sharp contrast to the devastated landscape and “nucleur winter” malaise that the realm falls into during the Grail quest. And I find it hard to imagine anyone who couldn’t love the moment when both Arthur and the land recover and the restored knighthood of the Round Table gallop through the flowering land to the marvelous music from the Carmina Burana’s O Fortuna.
Well, I can imagine those who don’t love it, actually, but for me it’s part of the epic-heroic, over the top appeal of the film. Most importantly, though, Excalibur is one of the films that sparked my imagination as to what Fantasy could be and achieve.
Rebecca asks whether, “…it is the quintessential retelling of the Arthurian legends?” and decides “no.” I agree that given the scope of the legend it’s probably not possible to really have a quintessential retelling — and in fact it is not necessary for the film to be that. For me it’s enough that Excalibur not only worked as a movie — probably because of the coherence Rebecca also mentions — but “spoke” to me and fired my imagination through its considerable artistic and storytelling achievement.
I’ll admit that I enjoyed “Excalibur” a lot more the second time around. When I first saw it a few years ago, I considered it really weird, though in rewatching it for my review I came to appreciate many of Boorman’s decisions. It was task and a half to do the entire Arthurian cycle justice, and so his imagery and symbolism have to be on-point throughout. For instance: Gorlois gets impaled at the same time Igraine is (unknowingly) raped by Uther; and the aforementioned state of Camelot continually signified by the shine of its knights’ armour.
I have since learned there’s another King Arthur adaptation on its way, directed by Guy Ritchie – but I still think it’s going to either take a film trilogy (about the length of the combined LotR movies) or an expensive TV series to do the entirety of the King Arthur legends justice.
And of course there’s the 1960s precursor to Excalibur as well, the musical “Camelot”, which I believe focused very much on the Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot triangle. I suppose it’s whether with any retelling of such a legendary story you try to capture all the variants or stick with the ‘big hits.’