Filmmakers recreating the story of King Arthur have several Arthurs to draw on. The most familiar is the knightly monarch of the Grail narratives of the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries, absorbed by Malory in Le Morte d’Arthur. This is the romantic or chivalric Arthur, the one with a Round Table and a problem with his unfaithful wife.
Such stories in turn draw on the older, 10th-century Welsh and other legends of the Christian chieftain who drove back the pagan hordes of invading Saxons. For Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing his History of the Kings of Britain in the turbulent 12th century, this Arthur is a symbol of native British unity and sovereignty.
For neither of these Arthurs is there any historical evidence. The chivalric Arthur is most obviously fictional, while the “Welsh” Arthur is more mythological than historical.
The most plausible speculation is that if there was a historical Arthur he possibly lived around the time of the Roman withdrawal from Britain in the 5th century. He is thought to have been a Romanised Briton or Celt, a local aristocrat or chieftain who took over some of the Roman governmental functions in the power vacuum left by the collapse of the empire.
This Roman Arthur seems to be the most attractive of the alternatives to David Franzoni, scriptwriter of the wildly successful Gladiator and now the new King Arthur. In what seems an original innovation, Franzoni makes him a Sarmatian exile in the service of Rome. The Sarmatians were horseback warriors from an area around the Caspian Sea. Franzoni’s movie speculates that Arthur and his band were Sarmatian cavalrymen given the job of policing Rome’s borders in Britain. When Rome withdrew, they were left to defend central Britain against both the invading Saxons and the unhappy local Britons bridling against Roman overlordship.
The poster slogan for King Arthur sells it as “The untold true story that inspired the legend”, and the movie’s press release insists upon its historical authenticity. There may be some reasonable conjectures here, but the filmmakers chuck a substantial dollop of fantasy on top of it anyway, which gives the game away: there is no “true story” behind the legend — just various narratives of greater or lesser plausibility.
Franzoni has clearly been charged with inventing the said “true story” while giving us a rollicking action-adventure à la Gladiator (which was historically dubious in several respects). He has no interest in the romantic Arthur of the Grail stories — this is Arthur on his way up, rather like King Arthur, the Young Warlord, as one cheap 1970s production had it. Franzoni also pre-empts violently the possibility of any Lancelot-Guinevere shenanigans later on. This is a rough, tough (though very carefully styled) Arthur of the dawn of the Dark Ages, Realpolitik and all. Merlin is no magician, but instead a woad-daubed anti-Roman guerrilla; Guinevere is a fighting princess in the Boudicca mould, though her skimpy outfits would not have displeased Karl Lagerfeld.
The Roman connection does give Franzoni the opportunity to play with conflicts within the Christianity of the time. He makes Arthur an adherent of the British theologian Pelagius, who believed we humans were fundamentally good, a viewpoint that got him declared heretical by the powerful church father Augustine, proponent of the doctrine of original sin — that is, we’re inherently wicked until saved by Christ. Augustine, of course, persecuted Pelagius and his followers mercilessly, until the heresy that we are basically okay died out.
Such sidelights give some intellectual texture and some moral fibre, as it were, to the story. But much else is botched. The filmmakers render their protestations of authenticity and meticulous research hollow by introducing anachronisms such as crossbows, while Lancelot appears to have become a sort of two-sword ninja.
One would forgive such muddle if King Arthur worked as a whole. But it takes itself too seriously, and it lacks the clean, driving narrative line that made Gladiator compelling. Director Antoine Fuqua (responsible for the execrable Tears of the Sun) stages some good action sequences, even including explosions (this is, after all, a Jerry Bruckheimer production), but the rest is ponderous.
If only the filmmakers had dumped their desire to parade as truth-tellers and concentrated on the narrative itself. We might have had a thrilling adventure instead of this unwieldy jumble.