Reviews

This is a ridiculously funny TV movie, though I doubt the producers planned it that way. The dialogue is stilted, the acting is wooden and the plot is completely nonsensical. However, it's really good for a laugh. Canadians will get a kick out of watching for the ridiculous Canadian goofs. (Like much on SciFi, this picture was produced in Canada -- Vancouver, natch.) Listen for the secondary characters with their Brampton accents... the Canada Post mailbox in the background... and my favourite, the US Navy Lieutenant with bars on his collar and corporal's stripes on his sleeve (reminds me of the MASH episode where Radar gets a "field promotion" to a Captain-Corporal). To make things even better, the rank chevrons point downward, a-la Commonwealth usage. Hell... you'd think someone in the crew would have noticed this?

I know I'm in the minority, but I found this to be a spectacularly bad film on almost every level. Michael Caine and Liam Neeson, fine actors who often seem to take roles to pay off their credit card debts, turn in the worst performances of their respective careers. Christian Bale turns in a stunning, or rather stunned performance (he seemed to be under the influence of some kind of heavy sedative). Only Morgan Freeman and Katie Holmes gave performances worth mentioning. The first because although he's in another of those "wise prophet in bad movie roles" that he seems to specialize in these days, his performance is warm and energetic. His Fox is actually likable -- in a three-dimensional way. Holmes turns in her best performance since Dawson's Creek. It's not saying much, but it's something.

The plot and the characters is beyond unbelievable and, in some ways, downright offensive. Bruce Wayne's father, a billionaire industrialist who also happens to be a physician, who builds a monorail -- a MONORAIL! -- to pull the city out of a depression (but not the national economy? Does the monorail go all the way to Metropolis, too?), and centralizes all transportation and the municipal water supply in his own corporate headquarters is a good guy? Huh? Sounds like a megalomaniacal John D. Rockefeller-meets-Boss-Tweed type, actually.

This isn't a minor point, since the father is central to Bruce Wayne's motivation (and his hackneyed Oedipal -- we saw it in Star Wars -- relationship with Neeson's Ra's Al Ghul). What the film is saying is that, without the intervention of corporate capital (Wayne Enterprises), the body politics will collapse in on itself; that the corporation -- Halliburton, maybe? -- will save the nation where civil society has failed. Make no mistake, Bruce Wayne is NOT a lone vigilante; he is the enforcement arm of the trillion dollar corporation he runs and which arms him. Given the state of things today, I find that disturbing.

The plot is so full of inconsistencies, that I wouldn't know where to start. The one that leaped out at me and had me shaking my head the most, though, was the idea that the best way to stop the microwave weapon from blowing up the central water system was to send it sailing into the central water system. I'm no physicist, but wouldn't the pressure built up from the vaporized water leading INTO the central system cause it to blow? Wouldn't it be possible to blow the whole thing up just by getting close? There's not much to be said for this film. The long shots of Gotham City looked like the backdrops of a mid-90s video game. The on-site sets looked like they were trying to do Tim Burton without actually having the faintest idea how. I know Gotham is a declining megalopolis, but why does the WHOLE city look like a slum -- except for Wayne Manor, which seems to be in the foothills of the Scottish Highlands with nary a road nor a telephone pole, nor a building to be seen up to the horizon.

I understand that superhero films require a suspension of disbelief. That, in fact, is part of their appeal. This one asks the viewer to suspend far too much. At the same time, it asks you to swallow an ideological message that only George W. Bush could love. That's just way too much.

Land and Freedom is one of the few non-Spanish feature films about the Spanish Civil War. This is a shame, but at least this one film almost makes up for the paucity of cinematic treatments of this event and period.

The story bears some superficial resemblance to George Orwell's experiences, as detailed in Homage to Catalonia -- a British leftist joins the POUM militia and gets mixed up in the events of May, 1937 and the suppression of the party. But Loach fleshes the story out with some wonderful characters and a rare, truly moving wartime love story.

The film is shot in a cinema-verite style that really emphasizes the grit, the horror and heroism of the characters' resistance to fascism. The leads, Ian Hart and Rosana Pastor give wonderful performances. Pastor's portrayal of a woman motivated by idealism, economic need and more than a bit of world-weariness, is incandescent. Yes, she often spout slogans, but that's how people often speak in those situations.

Marc Martinez and Eoin McCarthy are excellent as the militia section commander and the experienced Irish volunteer, respectively.

My one real quibble is that, perhaps by necessity, Loach compressed the really complex issues surrounding the May Days and the suppression of the POUM. The Communist Party were the bad guys, but things were much more complicated than that at the national level in Spain. Nationally, with the organization of the International Brigades and Soviet support for the republic, they were the good guys.

From David Carr's and Blanca's perspective, however, the national level was not important, so there really is a great deal of honesty in this film.

I did not hate this film. It was fairly entertaining, with well-staged battle scenes and high production values. The acting, though often either overblown or slightly wooden, was passable, and Ioan Gruffydd was actually quite good.

What bothered me is that the text at the opening of King Arthur promised a portrayal of the "historical" Arthur, and then manifestly failed to deliver. For the record, there is no "historical" Arthur. There are scattered references in the works of Gildas and Bede to an Arthur, or an Aurelius Ambrosianus upon whom the legend of Arthur is based. There is a fairly detailed story of a King Arthur in Geoffrey of Monmouth's History, though most of this seems drawn from Welsh and Cornish folktales of the type later collected in the Mabinogion. There is, however, very hard evidence that there ever was a King Arthur, or battles of Baddon Hill and Celidon forest.

There was, however, an invasion and colonization of Britain by the Saxons and other Germanic tribes during the fifth and sixth centuries, following the Roman military withdrawal. And it is pretty clear that the native Celtic and Romano-Celtic population put up one hell of a fight, slowing but not stopping the Saxon invasions. My own opinion is that there is enough smoke to suggest that the Arthur of medieval romance probably had some kind of historical prototype (most legends of this type usually do: a "Dux Bellorum" (war leader) as named in Gildas, possibly this shadowy Aurelius Ambrosianus.

So, I had high hopes for the movie King Arthur. After all, the film had the time period right, and the context looked convincing enough. Unfortunately, rather than using the historical material and context, the filmmakers completely ignored them. There was no consistency to this movie, and anyone with even a passing knowledge of the history of the early middle ages (the so-called dark ages) will be more than irritated by the pretended historicity of the movie. Some examples: 1. The film suggests the late-imperial Roman government and policy was directed by the Church, through the Papacy. This is absolutely false. Although the Empire was staunchly Christian at this time, it was the Emperor and his court -- at Constantinople rather than Rome -- that set and executed policy. Bishops did not order armies around. In fact, the See of Rome at the time was a relatively weak power centre at the time, especially compared to the Bishops of Constantinople and Alexandria.

2. While it is true that the Romans enlisted soldiers and units from border tribes like the Sarmatians, they were never posted at the other end of the empire. This would have made no sense, since the whole point of the foederati was to create a buffer between the empire and the northern and eastern barbarians. The Sarmatian soldiers were typically posted in Sarmatia.

3. Arthur would never have known Pelagius who, though a Briton or Irishman by birth, was in Rome from about AD 405. He was condemned by the Church, but never actually excommunicated or convicted of heresy, and probably died in Rome in AD 420, around the time the "historical" Arthur was born.

4. By the fifth century, the Roman occupied part of Britain had been quite thoroughly Romanized. The population was mostly Romanized Britons, and NOT an ethnically British population under the boot of a few foreign, ethnically Roman aristocrats. While there certainly were non-Romanized Celts like the Wodes about, most of the Britain that Arthur would have been fighting to defend would have been populated by Christian Britons who though of themselves as Romans.

5. Bishop Germanicus, or St. Germain, was not a former Roman general. He was a former Gaulish lawyer.

6. Hadrian's wall was built not to keep the Britonnic Celts and Saxons out of Roman Britain. It was built to keep the Picts and Hiberni -- who were explicitly NOT Briton and in the case of the Picts, probably not even Celts -- out of Britain. It runs/ran from Solway Firth to the River Tyne and thus is waaaaaaaaaaaaay too far north to have had much to do with the "historical" Arthur.

7. While the Church in the fifth century was certainly militant (read St. Augustine for that), the portrayal of churchmen as murderous ascetics who tortured and sacrificed pagans is absolutely ridiculous. In fact, by this time, most of the population south of Hadrian's Wall had been converted to Christianity.

What troubles me is that there is no reason why the filmmakers should have played so fast and loose with history to make this movie. I understand creative license, but the way in which they claim historicity on one hand, and then create a nonsense fabrication on the other – to no end other than the fact that they just seemed to want to do it that way -- makes it very difficult for me to respect King Arthur. I can respect Excalibur; at least no one claimed that it was historical.