Excalibur (1981)

John Boorman smokes, y’all. Unable to adapt The Lord of the Rings, he instead decides to smash as much of the legend of King Arthur as he can into one motion picture. In doing so, he finds that the throughline from quest to quest isn’t chivalry or glory, but the psychosexual phantasmagoria of a new world struggling to be born from the old. It’s gorgeous and clumsy and gory, its pretentiousness so grandiose that I couldn’t begrudge the crowd of movie trivia night going types who showed up to the screening for giggling through bits that weren’t all that campy.

Me, I was mostly overwhelmed by the whole thing. “Gorgeous” sells the look of Excalibur short. Alex Thomson’s cinematography paints England in shades of blood and silver and fire, an otherworldly green luminance shining on much of it like the last bit of light creeping out from the crack of a door that’s about to be closed for eternity. Everybody is wearing approximately one metric ton of armor, all of which is tailored specifically to the personality of its wearer — most excitingly, Mordred is armored like a twinky transfemme on the verge of booking her first H&M campaign. Merlin is like Gandalf if Gandalf smoked stronger stuff than Longbottom Leaf, like Yoda if Yoda were turgidly interested in helping his apprentice Jedi bone down.

I was also occasionally bored. Beyond Nicol Williamson’s Merlin and Helen Mirren’s Morgana, the majority of the performances are ostentatious, like the only way out of the trap Monty Python and the Holy Grail set for future adaptations of the legend was to crank the volume on them. I don’t mind that the plot is held together by the viewer’s memory of the legend — mine has faded plenty from when I was deeply into this stuff as a very cool teenager, and the effect was that everything felt like a dream. Its symbols are important to someone, were real at one time, but not to me. Grasping for them is like trying to hold onto mist, tangible one minute then gone forever. In Excalibur, no knight truly finishes their quest, they either wake up from the dream or die. They don’t let you make fantasy movies with that kind of fatalistic worldview anymore.