King Arthur: Legend of the Sword

You pretty much know the plot of King Arthur from the trailer – Arthur has to kill the evil king – and Guy Ritchie’s style doesn’t exactly mesh seamlessly with the genre and tone. But it’s fun to watch anyway; Charlie Hunnam is a charismatic lead, there are some great musical choices, and it looks amazing.

 
I like Guy Ritchie’s movies, and I knew I wanted to see  King Arthur: Legend of the Sword as soon as I saw the trailer. His style of dialogue doesn’t 100% mesh with the tone of the movie, but it wasn’t disastrous, and I like it, anyway. It was kind of funny to see them setting up the assassination attempt like a heist. The whole “here’s what everybody’s going to say” schtick isn’t my favorite, though.

It was cool seeing Aidan Gillen, but he was kind of distracting. And we have his character to thank for the bizarre plot point of them getting trapped in the city and so many people getting killed just because he wanted to do something that didn’t further their plan at all. I guess Bill was just that kind of guy. But it makes him seem super reckless and untrustworthy. I wouldn’t have him on my team after that.

 I did like the interlacing scenes when The Mage was saying they needed to send Arthur to the Dark Lands or whatever. And I also like that it didn’t really work, because she said they needed to totally break him and it didn’t seem like what he went through would be enough to do that. I was surprised after so many people died and he escaped into the forest, that that wasn’t motivation enough for him to kill the king. I thought that’s what those scenes were all about, but instead they were him deciding the sword had caused enough trouble and getting rid of it. Like really you can tell the king is a horrible guy, you should be motivated to kill him, not just want to let him carry on with his reign of terror.

The Lady of the Lake looked super cool. I spent all of Eric Bana’s scenes trying to figure out what else I’ve seen him in. I vaguely thought he might’ve played The Hulk at some point, but I never saw that movie, so that didn’t really help. And I realize now (without any further assistance) that it was Hanna, which I just re-wtached. I loved the reveal that the demon that killed Arthur’s parents was Vortigern. His whole demon look with all the fire and stuff was great, and so was what they did with the sword being blue and everything.

At first I couldn’t figure out why Mordred just let himself be killed by Uther like that, why no one tried to stop him. But I guess the sword was just magic (and it was Mordred’s own staff after all), which makes sense. I liked the scenes when they used the sword, and it was funny when Arthur killed everyone and then said “I’m going in the hole now.”

I was kind of confused about Arthur’s life at the brothel. I didn’t have any idea who these “Black Legs” they were talking about were until near the end, when I finally figured out that it was Vortigern’s soliders. Maybe they could’ve made that clearer earlier. The costumes were really cool. I loved Arthur’s entire look. Everything was in such dark tones, I liked how The Mage’s blue robe stood out so much. She was a cool character, but I’m on the fence about whether Astrid is a good actress or not.

Some of the musical choices were great; they really added a feeling of epic-ness. I actually kind of liked how they replayed Uther’s death scene about a hundred times, and we learned more about it each time. And then the part at the end where he told Arthur the sword was his was cool.