Caveat Lector

This King Arthur movie? You won’t catch me anywhere near it, and you wouldn’t even if it were getting better reviews than it is.

Like a percentage of ex-medievalists so large that they don’t want me hinting what it is, I went through a period of Arthur-mania. And while little of that madness remains, a base knowledge of sources and their timelines does linger still.

So no movie had better declare itself “the real story” unless it knows what it’s doing. And this movie doesn’t.

Yeah, okay, Riothamus, been there heard that. If you want to go that route, fine, though I think you’re mad. (Personally, I think the whole “real Arthur” enterprise is mad beyond madness. There’s a significant difference between the remote kindler of a gigantic legend and an intelligible historical figure with mythic accretions, say somebody like Alexander the Great.) But if you’re going to do that movie, Lancelot and Galahad and all those other Frenchies do not belong in it. Period-ruddy-exclamation-point. They just don’t.

I actually think there are good movies still to be made from the Arthurian legends. (Somebody besides Disney and Lerner & Loewe ought to tackle TH White. And for the love of heaven, why do people ignore Steinbeck?) I think there are good books still to be written, too, despite a firm belief that better than 90% of the Arthurian fantasy written in the last hundred years is purest goo and dribble.

But they’ve got to get away from the love-triangle thing. They’ve just got to. Done utterly to death, then raised from the dead and done again and again until even the zombie crumbles to dust. Sheesh, if we have to do triangles, can’t we at least do Tristram and Iseult for once?

There are so many more good stories in Arthuriana than that. So many more.

If I were a writer, which I’m not, I’d do The Book of Sir Gareth. Incredible richness there. A zealously loyal soul, capable of admiring others but well-stocked with personal pride, able to accept abuse without returning it or letting it turn him bitter—a soul so golden that he points out the flaws in others just by existing. And what happens to him? Murdered, in the end, because his personal hero has gone and created a situation too equivocal for a golden soul to survive in. That’s juicy stuff, that is.

And I’d do a real Book of Merlin, too. The de Boron Merlin, a wicked-smart politician and all-around intriguing fellow, has gotten lost under centuries of goo and dribble (and, yes, part of the blame is TH White’s, I fear). Reclaiming him (and Morgan le Fay along with him) would be a good deal of fun.

Yet we’re stuck with this travesty of a movie instead. (What was Keira Knightley thinking, getting involved with this one?) Bah.