That Last King Arthur Movie is Better Than You Think

Why we should give new spins on old stories a chance

[This article is meant as a companion piece to one posted yesterday by

The Brothers Krynn

about Merlin. We all hope to get a conversation started about the interpretation of myths, legends, and history and the artistic risks and vision needed to bring them to life properly, over and against the slop versions Hollywood would force feed us. Here I make a pitch for a movie I really think was overlooked and underappreciated, and I hope you watch it and agree.]

One of the most persistent and baffling characteristics of modern media is the endless proliferation of slop. On one level, provided costs are kept low, it can be profitable; this is, after all, the business model of Netflix. But less explicable is expensive and labor-intensive slop, the failure of projects that should be easy, crowd-pleasing money. The disaster that is the live-action Snow White is a perfect example. I hate to repeat myself, but I’m going to have to reference Richie from A History of Violence once more:

How indeed, Richie? All you had to do was hire a cute young brunette unknown who could sing the classic numbers and smile through interviews, pair her with an older, established actress who could vamp it up as a villain, hire Hornswoggle to play Doc, and boom- profits so high Alan Greenspan gives you two thumbs down for causing inflation.

John Cena could have played Prince Charming. I dare anyone to argue that that would be a worse idea than what they went with instead.

People have explained it in terms of ideology, that the cancer that is Woke has so metastasized through Hollywood’s collective brain that cerebral lesions should be eligible for writing credits. There’s certainly something to that. Others argue that the studio executives are simply overpromoted DEI hacks who are, well, just kind of stupid. I’m sure that’s true as well, but it’s not the whole story. After all, neither explanation does much to answer the obvious question of why the people behind it all who hope to make money just keep putting up with this crap.

I posit that the real culprit is twofold. One is that the studio executives, producers, writers, etc., are not merely dumb, but fundamentally alienated from the Western literary tradition that forms the basis of storytelling. The people who made the original Snow White had all read Grimm et. al. The people behind the remake seem barely to understand even the prior film. If, like the lead actress, you think that a movie from 1937 has nothing to say to an audience, what must that person think of the whole tradition behind it?

Consider what would have been the equivalent of Netflix-tier productions from the sixties, seventies, and eighties. The Hammer horror films were not only models of efficiency and cost-effectiveness, but featured well-written stories and top-notch acting from real professionals (Peter Cushing, Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, etc.) The plots were drawn from works of classic literature and treated seriously by people who had a real cultural connection to the material. The people who made those movies were interpreting stories that belonged to the common heritage of their intended audience; modern films are made by people who can hardly be bothered to watch old movies.

Do check out Dark Corners Reviews on YouTube.

This dovetails with the other salient characteristic of modern creators- cowardice. Because they have at best a surface-level understanding of why people even like something like Snow White, they really want to play it safe and retain as many of the superficial tropes as possible while producing what is essentially a mass-marketed consumable that offends no one. Thus there are expensive shoots and expensive edits and still more expensive reshoots, with entire plotlines scrapped because some focus group or victim group didn’t like something. The result is as bland and tasteless as the imitation food we eat, while at the same time still somehow being offensive, because of course the creators behind high production value slop don’t know anyone who thinks women like handsome princes and true love. It’s all joyless and soulless; they may as well have called it, AI Scraping: The Movie.

But I’m not letting us, the critical audience, off the hook on this one. I think that while it’s right to call out crap like this for what it is, we have perhaps not done justice to movies that really do try to do something innovative with traditional material. For good or bad, there are people trying to engage with myths and legends in interesting and innovative ways, and that should be encouraged. There are a number of examples of what I mean, but I think the best might be 2017’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword.

King Arthur was supposed to be the start of a franchise, but poor receipts and reviews doomed the project before it could get off the ground. I had no idea of any of that when I went to see it, and I was genuinely surprised that it wasn’t more popular than it was. Having read a good bit of commentary on it I think I now have a better understanding of what went wrong and what was merely perceived to have gone wrong, and I really still think it’s a misunderstood work that is far better than people give it credit for being.

First off, it’s a Guy Ritchie movie, which means it’s very much a Guy Ritchie movie. It’s not the product of endless focus-testing and market research, or the amalgamation of studio notes and product placement demands. King Arthur is pretty much one man’s vision. Ritchie specializes in high-energy, low concept underworld speedruns full of snappy dialogue and casual violence in modern, urban settings. But Ritchie had stretched a bit before 2017, with back-to-back period action thrillers in the form of the Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes duology. His frenetic style made for an interesting take on the traditionally staid and cerebral Holmes material (Peter Cushing never did bareknuckle pit-fighting during his run), and there was nothing inherently improbable about his taking on another British icon in the form of the legendary Dark Age king. One can only imagine what he might have done with other such Angloform content-

Grok shows us what might have been… and still could be!

The casting was another strong point, though here there is some room for argument. Charlie Hunnam plays Arthur as a typically Ritchie working-class street tough in typically Ritchie back alley London, though of course transposed into a Medieval fantasy setting. He has all the charisma and physical presence needed to handle a role previously occupied by Nigel Terry and Sean Connery, and his role in Sons of Anarchy fitted him well for the role of displaced prince (where he’s essentially Hamlet on wheels) and outlaw leader driven to seek vengeance on behalf of his family. Jude Law, who previously collaborated with Ritchie on the Sherlock Holmes films, made a villain turn as Vortigern, the usurping tyrant antagonist of the story. Eric Bana played Uther Pendragon, and David Beckham shows up, because why not?

One thing that especially sets people off in 2025, and for good reason, are race- and gender-swaps, and this movie does have a few. Most notable are Djimon Hounsou as Sir Bedivere and, in lieu of the absent Merlin (who was probably going to show up in the sequel), a female character called “the Mage.” But while generally a bad idea, there is context that can make such casting choices interesting and appropriate. For example, while the oldest source material from the early Middle Ages implicitly posits characters of the appropriate ancestry for their time and place, later Medieval retellings very often did exoticize Arthurian and other traditional material for the sake of novelty. Wolfram von Eschenbach’s 13th century Grail epic Parzifal features an explicitly interracial romance between Gamuret, the Angevin father of the eponymous hero, and the African Queen Belecane; they produce a mixed-race son who- since Eschenbach had apparently never seen an actual mulatto- he described as piebald in the text (think a Holstein cow). The Matter of France material got a Renaissance update in the Orlando epics of Boiardo and Ariosto with the addition of Angelica of Cathay (China) and the African knight Ruggiero. It’s actually more common than not.

Deviant Art’s finest illustrators at work

Granted, none of that is swapping as such, but it does show that even within the traditional canon there is some room for expanding the character base beyond the ethnic dimensions of the oldest versions. But there is a lot of nuance to any sort of reimagined casting that can very easily just devolve into DEI-ESG silliness- think Amazon’s Lord of the Rings as well as pretty much everything else since the Great Awokening began. The big question to ask with each iteration is, is this sort of thing necessary for the story that is being told? And I think in the case of King Arthur it actually is, though not perhaps for the reasons envisioned by the director.

There is a lot of subtext to King Arthur, some probably intentional, some not. Much like John Carpenter, Ritchie is a man of the left, but also like Carpenter, his films are fair game for subversive right-wing revisionist interpretations. They Live was supposed to make a mockery of Reaganite America; now John Nada stares out through his sunglasses in a thousand DR memes. Likewise, the reception that King Arthur got in the mainstream press mainly interpreted its politics as ‘multicultural underdogs rebel against traditional English rural elite conservatives… something, something… Brexit bad!’ Maybe, but to me it’s much more interesting to think of it a different way.

The basic narrative is one of usurpation and restoration of right authority, with true legitimacy resting on blood and a connection to the people. Vortegern is not a traditional elite; he murders the true king with black magic and tyrannizes the people in order to engage in technocratic government projects that impoverish his subjects and accomplish nothing. Arthur is the disinherited rightful king, the heir to a world that was stolen from him. He has no traditional family or supportive community and has to build one, ad hoc, from the human material around him, which, in a disordered land, is necessarily one of multicultural anomie. The primary means through which Arthur does this is by forming strong relationships with such honorable warriors as he finds in his milieu; his proto-Knights of the Round Table are a mix of street scrappers, foreign allies, and loyalists to the royal cause. Vortigern’s great terror is that the streetwise and charismatic young white guy Arthur will rediscover his rightful place in his country and true power- symbolized by the sword Excalibur- and in true PMC fashion, the usurper is willing to offer up even the blood of his own child to monsters in order to transform into a demon to maintain his illegitimate rule. The scene at the end referenced by the Vox author linked above, where she interprets Arthur’s peacemaking with the Vikings visiting his court as an ode to Globohomo, could just as easily be seen as two groups of Euro-trads putting aside their differences for the sake of the greater good.

A scene from an unelated documentary about how mainstream Euro-pols deal with right-populists.

Does it work? I really think it does, and that for all of its flaws, it at the very least represents a serious attempt by a real auteur to reinterpret a major piece of Western lore for a contemporary audience. It’s a genuinely fun movie with real emotion. And there were other things working against it besides the intimations of Woke. It was probably budgeted far more highly than warranted. It was perhaps a bit more high-concept than the audience it was meant for, far more of a reimagining than the Sherlock Holmes films. I don’t remember especially heavy marketing; a surprising number of people I’ve spoken to about it have never heard of it.

But King Arthur is not the only film to elude the audience and respect it deserves. Ritchie can be compared to Zach Snyder in that both of them have very distinct aesthetic styles and are very polarizing figures artistically. The latter’s cinematic interpretations of the Persian Wars in two movies also rubbed critics the wrong way, but despite having a hero quote Emiliano Zapata, they have become a staple of RW meme culture. And yet, they and many others attempting similarly ambitious reimaginings just don’t really get the chance they deserve in this area.

Whatever flaws King Arthur has, they are those of an individual artist making choices that he feels best communicate the story he is trying to tell. He took chances, he went big, and in this case, it didn’t work out financially or critically. But I think that was wrong, and big picture, we should be encouraging bold choices and artistic gambles. King Arthur may be spastic, gaudy, irreverent, and overdiverse, but it’s not slop, and the best way to prevent slop in the future is to patronize organic cinema, and other such media.

I do fault Ritchie for his failure to find at least a cameo role for Mickey. And no Vinnie Jones, WTF?

And no, I’m not talking about the upcoming Christopher Nolan film with the Viking longboats and literal Black Athena (I hope Martin Bernal sues the studio, or somebody does at least). The former is at least only mildly dumb, but the latter really cannot be other than an attempt by Woke to mark its territory by aggressively defecating its scent onto everything. This should not be a casting option in a world where Monica Bellucci exists, and failing that, it would still be preferable to find that actress from My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Why, Nolan?! You made Inception.

If you find a film that’s truly interesting and original, one that represents an earnest attempt to tell a classic story in a new way, I urge you to look at it closely before dismissing it. Sometimes there are real treasures wrapped up in misleading packaging. Sometimes it takes a few viewings to really get below the surface. And while more often than not the effort is less than rewarding, when you do find something truly good, it makes it all worthwhile.