Besides the legend of Troy and of the Greek heroes and which I wrote a series of blog entries about here, the other mythological story I’ve always been fascinated with is that of Arthurian Legends.
That said, I’m less familiar with the characters and stories though, having only read Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon and seen the very well-done TV mini-series adaption of the novel, briefly read Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur from years ago, and recently picked up the reprint tradeback edition of Camelot 3000 (marvelous graphic novel that I first read from my elder brother’s collection 20 years ago).
Of film adaptations, it seems that every manly Brit actor wants a turn at Arthur. There was 1995’s First Knight, starring Richard Gere as a surfer-dude Lancelot in funky hairlocks, Sean Connery as an aged Arthur and Julia Ormond as Guinevere.
Such talent, but the film was just awful where everything went wrong. The production sets looked like they were seconded from budget warehouse sales. And Arthur’s knights looked like they’re just come out of a frat party and were dressed in cheap looking blue tabards on top of aluminium-foil looking armor. Jerry Goldsmith’s bombardistic score was out of sync with the very TV-like and underwhelming visuals on screen. And Camelot looked like the Everland theme park in Korea that we visited during our honeymoon. All that was missing were rainbows, bunnies, and rabbits.
Worse of all was the complete miscasting of the Arthur and Guinevere roles: Connery is a freakin’ thirty-five years older than Ormond. If it wasn’t for that Connery looked bored throughout the film, you’d be forgiven to start thinking the film was requiring the Arthur here to be some sort of DOM to a queen young enough to be his daughter. 
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Clive Owen went next as 2004’s King Arthur (above), and starred opposite Ioan Gruffudd as a badass dual-sword wielding Lancelot. That was a far better effort if still flawed. The script claimed to be an authentic telling of Arthur’s origin (but who really knows LOL), featured marvelous cinematography of Britain, and a great if self-plagiarized soundtrack by Hans Zimmer.The show was a sort of road-chase film where Arthur and his merry band of knights are chased across Britain by Saxons.
And the film had Keira Knightley as a leather bikini-clad and bow-wielding barbarian warrior princess Guinevere, and who traded modern day cosmetics for war paint. Talk about revisionist legend LOL.
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And not to be outdone, Mr. Darcy whoops Colin Firth also wanted his turn as Arthur in 2007’s The Last Legion (right). Like Owen’s King Arthur, Firth’s film went with the line that the Arthur’s origin was really more Roman than Brit.
Unfortunately, the film had cheap visuals (though not to the budget MIC-likeness level of First Knight), boring action scenes, insipid dialog, and is very different from the Arthurian legend we’re already familiar with.
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By far, the best Arthurian Legends film remains for me 2006’s Tristan & Isolde (below) starring Spider-Man‘s James Franco, and a relative-unknown then but stunningly gorgeous Sophia Myles as Tristan and Isolde respectively. Admittedly it’s a chick flick, but both of the leads could act, were likable, and their intimate moments were tender. You will empathize with them in their tragic romance. Rufus Sewell does a supporting role as the good King Marke – a very different role than the usual evil characters he plays on screen. The cinematography is stunning like in Owen’s King Arthur.
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