Before we had Peter Jackson to interpret our 'modern' fairy-tales, and wire-work to negate the effects of gravity, we had John Boorman's 'Excalibur'. Not to deride all of the CGI fans, there *was* a way to do things in the days before computer-generated SFX. That said, this film still holds substantial amounts of water, more than 20 years after it was filmed.
I'm one of those feebs who never managed to read all of the Tolkien books (one only), but I've read no fewer than 4 versions of Mallory's 'Mort D'Arthur' as a teenager and musty college English Literature student. *This* is the film that always did it for me. The script, the cinematography and the performances are all top-notch, especially with the many off-center characterizations, Nigel Terry's Merlin being the most outstanding.
The other notable thing about this film is it's relative *lack* of slickness: These days, anybody who rides a horse or wields a sword in a film is ninja-graceful - not so here. I'm not so sure you could classify this as realism per se, but Yuen Wo Ping (The Matrix) was *not* the fight choreographer, and nobody associated with the Chinese Opera School had anything to do with this production. Rather, Boorman embraces the fact that anyone who straps on a couple hundred pounds of armor and tries to fight on top of a horse with 30 pound weapons *isn't* going to be the most graceful or coordinated bloke around. This kind of 'realism' is both admirable and refreshing.
So, if you're in the mood for a swords-and-sorcery film without all of the slickness, an engaging (and faithful) storyline and more than a bit of 'creative anachronism', this film is well worth checking out.
8/10
I'm one of those feebs who never managed to read all of the Tolkien books (one only), but I've read no fewer than 4 versions of Mallory's 'Mort D'Arthur' as a teenager and musty college English Literature student. *This* is the film that always did it for me. The script, the cinematography and the performances are all top-notch, especially with the many off-center characterizations, Nigel Terry's Merlin being the most outstanding.
The other notable thing about this film is it's relative *lack* of slickness: These days, anybody who rides a horse or wields a sword in a film is ninja-graceful - not so here. I'm not so sure you could classify this as realism per se, but Yuen Wo Ping (The Matrix) was *not* the fight choreographer, and nobody associated with the Chinese Opera School had anything to do with this production. Rather, Boorman embraces the fact that anyone who straps on a couple hundred pounds of armor and tries to fight on top of a horse with 30 pound weapons *isn't* going to be the most graceful or coordinated bloke around. This kind of 'realism' is both admirable and refreshing.
So, if you're in the mood for a swords-and-sorcery film without all of the slickness, an engaging (and faithful) storyline and more than a bit of 'creative anachronism', this film is well worth checking out.
8/10