MovieChat Forums > King Arthur (2004) Discussion > Historical fiction

Historical fiction

posted 9 years ago by dpatricksawyer-827-554207
14 replies | jump to latest

One thing I find difficult to tolerate is how a film can start out saying something like "This is the true story" when it is a story based on fable, legend, mythology. No real historical bona fide proof, just theories. Do away with such nonsense and give a film that is entertaining without trying to justify how historically "real" it is.

And for some reason, I cannot stand Ray Winstone in any movie he has been in, just my personal point of view.

As far as the film goes, it is so so. I can watch a film I like several times over, this one, just once.

[–] dpatricksawyer-827-554207 9 years ago

Just to add, Ray Winstone always appears as ham, and I am cheesy, or is that choosy?

[–] pol-edra 8 years ago

Then again, a fiction that opens with "Historians agree that... "is obviously NOT going to be in earnest about its historical aspirations. It is, after all, historical FICTION, emphasis on fiction, noun, not historical, adj. If history and historical accuracy was so important to the genre, it would be called fictional history. Or maybe fictitious history? I wonder which one would make more sense. Hard to decide, considering the genre does not exist as such!

"Occasionally I'm callous and strange."

[–] [deleted] 6 years ago

For marketing purposes, "This is the TRUE story of how it actually happened!" probably has more audience appeal than "Oh, a certain scholar published a hypothesis in some obscure scholarly journal a couple decades ago, and we decided to loosely base our movie on that notion but still include characters like Lancelot and Guinevere who never even appeared in the earliest King Arthur stories."

[–] R_Kane (15828) 4 years ago

No wonder you deleted yourself.

[–] [deleted] 6 years ago

Good points.

[–] Furienna (3377) 5 years ago

Like I said in a different thread: it is pretty much impossible to find a movie like this, that takes no liberty with the history. So you have to enjoy it for what it is. Or if you can't do that, just don't watch it again and move on with your life.

[–] [deleted] 5 years ago

Indeed.

[–] Wuchak (8855) 5 years ago

One thing I find difficult to tolerate is how a film can start out saying something like "This is the true story" when it is a story based on fable, legend, mythology.

Movies do this all the time to lend a sense of "this really happened" to the viewing experience.

For people who have a problem with this applied to the distant past of 1500 years ago, how are they going to handle movies that apply it to recent (fictional) events, like the early 70's of "Mason County Line" and "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre"?

Since there's no archaeological evidence to support the existence of Arthur as a real person it's all lore.

[–] [deleted] 5 years ago

Yeah, Merlin and Guinevere shouldn't be in this.

[–] Furienna (3377) 5 years ago

Why not?

[–] [deleted] 5 years ago

Because this movie is trying to reconstruct the story of Arthur as a 5th-century Romano-British figure. A lot of the familiar Arthurian characters were added to that mythos much, much later than that.
In early historical writings that mention leaders that could have been the basis for the King Arthur legend, there is no such person as Guinevere. She didn't appear in any Arthurian stories until hundreds of years later in the 12th century. It's the same thing with Merlin. There was a mythical character called Myrddin Wyllt who lived in the wilderness of northern Britain, but this character had nothing to do with the stories of King Arthur until Geoffrey of Monmouth shoehorned him into the Arthurian setting in the 12th century along with Guinevere. For that matter, Lancelot shouldn't have appeared in this either, since he first showed up in French writings about Arthur in the 12th century.
The British TV show "Arthur of the Britons" did a *much* better job at re-creating the King Arthur story set in the Dark Ages, before all the romanticizing and addition of all kinds of spurious characters of later centuries.

[–] ATG6 (3000) 5 years ago

British TV shows bore Americans though.

This was a pretty good movie version of Arthur, and closer to the right time period and feel than most of the Arthur movies.

[–] [deleted] 5 years ago

I dunno, Doctor Who and Downton Abbey seem to be big hits with Americans.

[–] ATG6 (3000) 4 years ago

And most of the historical evidence for Arthur doesn't even indicate that he was a king. He was more like a 4-star general working for a group of kings to drive out the Saxons in the 5th and 6th centuries. It seems odd that leaders of kingdoms would band together and let someone else lead their forces, but Arthur was apparently a military genius and an unmatched warrior, and the Saxons were a real threat to them all.

After defeating the Saxons in a sequence of 12 battles, Arthur brought 20 years of peace to Britain. It is why he was so fondly remembered through the centuries.

And his legend may be conflated with an actual 2nd century Roman military leader, Lucius Artorius Castus, who led an auxiliary legion of Sarmatian cavalary (who wore bone armor and fought with lances and bows) in a different series of battles along Hadrian's Wall, against Pictish and Scottish invaders. Artorius fought for five different Roman legions (serving 5 year tours with each), the first 2 in Syria and Israel, where he could have searched for the Holy Grail and the True Cross.