Review of Excalibur (1981) by Numna S — 06 Nov 2009

I'm really not sure what I got myself into when I put Excalibur on my Netflix list. I figured that a grand telling of the King Arthur story in movie form couldn't fail. Oh boy...

Well, for starts, without knowing the actual story of King Arthur, you will be lost. This movie is like an abridged version of the novel, even if it's run time clocks at almost 2 and a half hours. The first scene of the movie literally goes, "King Uther has found Excalibur." Well, who the hell is King Uther?

This glossing over of the plot could be forgotten if the characters were given development. Uther takes the mistress of a rival king without so much as a love interest developing (which did happen in the novel, however). Merlin is introduced without any background on who he is or what powers he actually contains.

The worst bit to this development is the editing. When Arthur is taken by Merlin when he is young, the next scene flashes forward to Arthur being a squire. Where is the text saying, "20 years later?" The movie does this numerous times and it just feels awkward to have a scene go, "They will betray me," and immediately follow with, "You warned me all those years ago." What years?! It was 5 minutes!

The whole love triangle with Lancealot, Arthur and Guenevere gets nearly lost. You never really get the impression that Lancealot actually does enjoy Guenevere's presence, but suddenly they are betraying their king. It just feels awkward, especially if Guenevere knew about the love before hand. Why not just include a better explanation like the novel did?

The search for the Holy Grail is also relegated to the last 25 minutes of the film. We see a bunch of knights die and scenes that would put Beatles videos to shame with their psychedelic qualities, but when one scene says, "Search for the Grail," and the next is 10 years later, why did we miss so much?

The acting is also a bit strange, though that may be do to the poor sound recording. Lines are delivered with an awkward sense of Victorian era speech. Everyone tries to act so elegant and yet the actual spoken words don't match their style. There is no King's English in the movie, so why does everyone have to act so stuck up?

The cast is a decent ensemble of actors, though. Having Liam Neeson and Patrick Stewart in the same movie is always awesome. Nicol Williamson looks pretty decent as Merlin. Helen Mirren is ridiculous as the evil necromancer, Morgana.

The cinematography is also pretty good. A few scenes had me question if the DVD was HD (much like Dragonslayer), but a lot of the movie takes place in the castle or around camp sites. There isn't a lot of exposition given to the environment, but the few scenes that show lush greens or sprawling lakes are definitely a sight to behold.

In the end, I think my only real beef with this movie is so fast it wants to retell the Arthur tale (or maybe how much of it it crams into one movie). If proper time was devoted to the characters, or maybe if the editing informed you of what year you were in, this movie could have been decent. As it stands, it's a very confusing a fast moving look at the Arthur tale and one that I wouldn't recommend to anyone who knows nothing of King Arthur.