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Spoilers Guy Ritchie's King Arthur: Legend of the Sword Pre-Release Thread

So this comes out today, anybody actually planning on seeing it.
The reviews are actually not as horrible as I was expecting, although they're still not that good. It's got a 41/100 with 40 reviews on Metacritic. I was expecting something like a 10 or 20, so I am pleasantly surprised.
 
^ Most trades I've read had it as a weak opening (shallow flop) and no legs. Probably won't cover production costs.

As for me, I'll probably wait until this one hits HBO or Netflix (which might be in a month or two)
:cool:
Q2
 
Same here. I'd probably consider seeing it in the theater if Guardians hadn't just come out, and we didn't have Alien: Covenant, PotC: Dead Men Tell No Tales, Wonder Woman, and The Mummy all coming in the next month.
 
This is one of those movies that screamed "I'm gonna flop!" pretty loud. They shelved it for 2 years, then sacrificed it to GoG2.

This isn't a release, it's a mercy killing.
 
I don't think trailers for any movie have ever made me want to see it less than the ones they put out for this, I'll pass and see it once it's free. There are pictures coming out right now which I think wil be meh (Alien:C) or so-so (POTC) yet my desire to see them is so much stronger.
 
I liked Snow White and the Huntsman, and was interested in Seventh Son, which I haven't actually gotten around to seeing yet.:shifty:
 
San Francisco Chronicle critic Mick Lasalle's review is in - and while it's negative, it lacks the vivid ferocity of his Ritchie reviews past:

“King Arthur: Legend of the Sword” is not like any other movie about Camelot. To start with, it’s worse — basically a sci-fi war saga set in the Dark Ages, inflected here and there with flashes of grotesque magic. [...] Ritchie revels in clumsiness, as if believing that by putting a spotlight on it, his lack of ability might be mistaken for a style. [...]

Hunnam is a sturdy leading man, but he’s the victim of a script that keeps him from driving the story. Basically, Arthur doesn’t want to do anything, and that’s a big problem. A protagonist without a goal or passion doesn’t make for a modern spin on a classic tale. It doesn’t make him just like the audience. It makes him a big, fat bore.

In the absence of any organic propulsion, Ritchie must resort to muscling the audience into excitement, through quick cutting and loud, thumping music. But the result is a movie that’s uninflected, in which every scene is given the same grand importance, even the least important ones. The strategy backfires as it always does, and soon the struggle that most engages the audience is the one to stay awake.​


The AV Club's Ignatiy Vishnevetsky draws a bit more blood:

The legendarium of King Arthur and the Knights Of The Round Table is rich in symbolism, mysticism, and visions, and so any attempt to narrowly rewrite it for modern tastes ends up coming across as a failure of imagination. Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur was the last costly wannabe blockbuster to ask what Arthurian legend would be like if it were boring, and before that, there was Jerry Zucker’s First Knight. [...]

But there is the other, lugubrious King Arthur, a strained fantasy flick with pseudo-medieval production design that suggests a very special episode of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys about the evils of fascism, filmed on an overcast day. [...]

His Camelot is a cheerless eyesore, a stone salt shaker on a mountain side. No wonder his wise-ass Arthur is reluctant to take up the mantle of kinghood. Ruling from such a dismal parapet looks like a chore.​


But the prize might go to this bit, from the Chicago Tribune's Michael Phillips:

Optimism is nowhere to be found in Ritchie's movie itself. It is a grim and stupid thing, from one of the world's most successful mediocre filmmakers, and if Shakespeare's King Lear were blogging today, he'd supply the blurb quote: "Nothing will come of nothing."​
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Is it bad because Guy Ritchie tried to do a new twist on the Camelot legend? After all, today's movie audiences don't really like anything new. Or does it just have a bad story?
 
What's so new about a revisionist/grimdark Arthurian story? 1995's First Knight stripped out all the magic, and was a romance drama. 2001's excellent The Mists of Avalon TV movie was a female-centric take that cast the Christian monarchy as a corrupting, foreign influence. The 2004 Clive Owen King Arthur movie was about Roman conscripts who hated being knights. The series Merlin was a Smallville-fication of the theme, while the 2011 Starz series Camelot was full of graphic violence and nudity. Meanwhile, we got a grim and gritty medieval Robin Hood from Ridley Scott and the very adult, rape- and murder-filled Game of Thrones. And this summer, we get the Round Table plus Transformers, oh, joy.

Excalibur came out over thirty-five years ago. At this point, an upbeat, colorful, family-friendly story would be a "new twist" on the material, not yet another deconstruction that shares its desaturated, gritty aesthetic with a hundred cheapo DTV medieval sword flicks from the past decade.
 
Hugo Rune said:
On more interesting matters of "What I really want to see"... Given the success, and general quality of, the BBC's translation of Bernard Cornwell's Last Kingdom series, I'd love to see his "Arthurian Saga" The Warlord Chronicles (Winter King / Enemy of God / Excalibur) given the plush TV treatment. Most of the fantastical elements of the myth removed, played as Dark Age Political Fantasy juxtapose with the beginnings of the end for Paganism, it is by far and away his best work, and, for me, the most complete and thrilling adaptation of the myth/history out there.

And Cornwell's Nimue is a character for the ages

Hugo - Go get it. Go on...
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Having read quite a few of the Sharpe books as a child, Winter King renewed my love for Cornwell, and I agree it his best work: a lot of his stories, though generally excellent, often seem to follow the "formula" of enlightened pagan who just wants to worship his old gods in privacy vs. overzealous Christians. (he even managed to do this in an American War of Independence story).

I need to catch up on Lost Kingdom - I've read all of the books and enjoyed most, but I think the setting is getting old.

Starbreaker said:
Who was the target audience for this movie?
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People who thought "Lock Stock et al." was cool...

dJE
 
Gaith said:
Here's a movie that combines the anachronistic "history with ATTITUDE!!!" tone that led Gods of Egypt, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Ben-Hur (2016) to such lofty heights last year alone. [...] I haven't seen such a sure-fire franchise starter since Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe unleashed the first of their many Robin Hood films on the cosmos.
Click to expand...
Welp, looks like I was right: Cockney Arthur: Legend of the Desaturation Filter recouped less than 10% of its production budget alone (not counting marketing) in its first US weekend. (Variety reports Ritchie's initial cut was 3.5-hours long - Jesus, WB, do you even read these scripts you throw $175m and more at?!) THR forecasts overall losses of up to $150m, making it the first major flop of the summer.

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"Well, at least we may still get some sequels."
"Yeah - on fanfiction.net!"
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​
 
4 pages in and not one mention of the fact David Beckham will be gracing the silver screen.

Am I really the only one bemused by this concept?
 
He's already appeared in 5 movies, Bend it Like Beckham, 3 Goal movies [although technically the third used footage from the 2016 World Cup], and The Man From U.N.C.L.E., so there's really nothing new there.
 
Posh Spice's husband is in this? Never mind my previous remarks; lemme go buy a ticket forthwith!
 
Saw the trailer to this with GoTG2 - looked incredibly generic and dull. Something exploded halfway through the ad. Thud.
 
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