I swore I wouldn't see this silly film, out of a sense of boycotting Hollywood historical tripe that tries to pass itself off as accurate. This bore all the earmarks of such an attempt.

But for my son's birthday I went to the nearest movie house and discovered that it was either King Arthur or nothing at all: so in we went.

Actually, I had a fun time. There was so much that tickled my funny bone. And, the eye candy was rather good, after all: the armor and weapons spanned over a thousand years of development, but at least there were no pieces of late-medieval plate armor to be seen - that surprised me. It did have a "dark ages" feel to it, despite the Saxons and their crossbows(!).

Points of interest, pro and con:

The cinematography was first rate; there were beautiful scenes, spectacular even.

The acting and characterization was OK to fairly good, nothing really stunk here.

The story stunk. I mean, you can't start narrating using the voice of Lancelot, and then kill him in the last battle, and then finish up the "epilog" with his voice as if nothing has happend to him. And besides that, KILL OFF LANCELOT?!?! What were they thinking? How can the legendary love triangle between him, Arthur and Gwennie occur if he gets killed in the first battle between Arthur and the invading Saxons? "Boars" (played by Ray Winstone - "Will Scarlet" in the Richard Carpenter TV series Robin of Sherwood) was my favorite "knight" character, but I would still have opted to kill him off and let Lancelot live.

There was plenty of *magic*, all of it more or less defying the laws of physics: arrows that drag barbed wire across forest trails to block escaping mounted knights, by sticking the arrows into tree trunks in a sort of crisscrossing mesh; huge gates on Hadrian's wall, which were opened by oxen (IIRC) the first time, but seem to open without human or animal assistance later on; 8" thick ice which fractures horrifyingly and blindingly fast, at the stroke of an axe (well, it did take a few strokes, but each stroke did a lot of damage: the compound effect is awesome to watch, like something straight out of a nightmare where anything is possible); exploding fire bombs that look almost as nasty as napalm.

I thought the devices were all unoriginal, and lacking for the most part. There really should have been more than seven knights, including Arthur, the great commander of half a dozen surviving Sarmatian cavalry: Arthur looked silly riding his horse out "in front" of the five survivors (we lost one on the ice, btw), to give them an Aragorn-like pre battle pep talk: he should have just sat in line with them and had a "well boys, I guess this is it" sort of last chat. And of the original seven knights, four (again, IIRC) died: I was beginning to think that this was some third remake of "the Maginificent Seven" "Seven Samurai". Then "Boars" (Ray Winstone) looked, sounded and acted a LOT like the "Boars" in "The Warlord", played by Richard Boon, way back in the mid 60's. What originality they did inflict upon me was tepid and screwed up the story (e.g. killing off Lancelot, as I already ranted about: added to this is the scene, in the deadly cold of the mountain pass - remember that 8" thick ice I mentioned - and Gwennie decides to take a bath, in a wagon, with sheer curtains to keep out the cold, but let out the light, sufficient for Lancelot to pant with temptation, and meet Gwennie's eyes lingeringly - truly one of the dorkiest scenes in the whole film).

But, the reason for going is for the carnage, and they provided a lot of that. The aftermath of the dead strewn across the battlefield was impressive. Dead Lancelot's voice proclaimed it the "battle of Badon hill", yet we are clear from the getgo that this is just inside Hadrian's wall; and besides, Badon hill is the legendary nemesis of Arthur, not the beginning of everything.

Oh yeah, Arthur gets his girl, the wedding taking place inside a circle of very familiar standing stones (well, some of them are standing still, mostly all the horizontal capstones are off - sheesh, was there ever a time when such places were in more or less one piece?). A final volley of Pictish flaming arrows takes the place of a volley of guns or fireworks to celebrate the glad event - the arrows just sort of disappear, it is all so weird.

Go see it. There is much that is pretty to watch, and enough foolishness to create a cult following who enjoys mocking the bad parts (of which there are plenty).

My favorite moment was supposed to be serious: we see our seven heroes riding at the gallop across the crest of a grassy hill in a column; and my imagination took the horses away and gave coconut halves to squires to clop together to make the galloping sound: it was that close to "MP & the HG", really......