Review of The Green Knight (2021) by Va1 — 31 Aug 2021

There are certainly two ways one can look at this movie. I will start from the perspective of person who have never read the poem:

-This movie is a solid piece of art, with some great thinking involved, and with good acting as well. However, this is where it stops.

As a person who read the poem and wrote a great essay on it, I am utterly disappointed. First things first, Arthur's sister is Indian? Come on. Also, Gawain is not the son of Morgana le Fay, but a son of Morgause according to the WHOLE Arthurian cycle, which Lowrey decided to disregard and just make a movie on ONE piece of work. Second of all, the scenes with bandints, giants, and a fox a made up, which would be fine if they actually brought something to the adaptation, but they did not, so I consider them useless in the sense of this movie. However, when the movie gets to the point which was actually in the poem, it fails there as well. The whole point of Gawain being in Bertilak's castle for 3 days was to show how Gawain is able to resist temptations due to him being a knight and keep his honor in not sleeping with Lord Bertilak's wife. In the poem, the author demonstrates hunting scenes, where hunters have to choose different methods to achieve success when hunting different animals, namely - fallow deer, wild boar, and a fox. Moreover, the author shows scenes in which the wife of the owner of the castle tries to woo Gawain in various ways. While these two events do not seem related to each other, there are similarities between them, and the animals that are hunted seem to symbolize the lady's behavior towards Gawain. This is the most important part of the story, but it was TOTALLY missed by Lowrey for some reason. Therefore, the ending of the story was not on point as well, as it technically does not show Gawain's fate after his encounter with The Green Knight. In the poem, though, the knight strikes three times but only hits Gawain once for not giving him the green belt. At this point it turns out that The Green Knight is actually Lord of the castle himself, which was the ENTIRE point of the castle part. 3/10 for me as to being not a very good (at all) adaptation, but still being a decent movie, hence the three points.