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That’s all fine with Arthur, because once he gathers his best warriors and forms the Knights of the Round Table, there is meat and wine and dance and song, and every night is Saturday night because it’s good to be the king! Arthur eventually marries longtime love Guenevere (Cherie Lunghi), who catches the eye of his greatest knight, Lancelot (Nicholas Clay). This is a problem, but everyone is so fat and happy they fail to see the danger right under their own feet. Everyone, that is, except Sir Gawain (Liam Neeson), who tries to warn Arthur, but because he’s such a notoriously angry drunk, people find him more than a little hard to take seriously.

As if that wasn’t enough, further gumming up the works is Arthur’s half-sister Morgana (Helen Mirren), an aspiring sorceress who desperately seeks to be Merlin’s apprentice. She’s bitterly jealous of Arthur and wants power for herself, so she seeks to steal Merlin’s power and assemble an army to take the Kingdom into her own hands. And because Merlin, like a lot of the men in this universe, keeps his brain in his pants, he makes things a little too easy for her. Yes, a mid-30s Helen Mirren running around dressed like the cover of Heavy Metal magazine is pretty enticing, but come on, Merlin. You KNOW what she’s up to.

This is just me, but if I’m the greatest wizard in the world and I want to get busy with someone, I just crank my magic staff up to eleven and conjure up a Medieval Kelly LeBrock rather than take my adopted nephew’s bitter, angry, completely bananas half-sister under my wing. But Prophecy is Prophecy, and everybody’s got their role to play, even if it means making unimaginably stupid decisions when there’s a better way right in front of you.

And if you’re the kind of person who likes a movie to make sense, this is the problem you’ll have with Excalibur. All of these characters seem arbitrarily doomed to their fates, making (or not making) wise or stupid decisions not of their own volition, but because they feel they HAVE to. There are few heroes in this story; both good and evil characters come to rely on the actions of others to define them. This is meant to be the story of Arthur’s journey from a wide-eyed young boy to a wisened old king, but for most of the movie he sits idly by and delegates his fate - and the fate of the Kingdom - to the decisions of the people around him.

“I've lived through others far too long!” Arthur declares at the high point of the film, and you can’t help but agree with him at that point.

But bear in mind, this story IS based on a 15th century myth, and stories of that age were typically constructed as extended fables, meant to illustrate a simple moral lesson by making you sit through hours of exposition and flowery dialogue. In this story, Arthur and his contemporaries seem well aware of their status as myth and they act as such. The words they speak sound less like things people would actually say, and more like ancient etchings inscribed on stone tablets. Their actions are largely symbolic, driven by the unseen hand of fate rather than free will, all for the express purpose of making a moral point about their King’s intellectual development. And their world is a tableau patched together with pages from the Book of How to be a Good Person and Not Let Your Friends Down.

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