Guy, why are there giant octopus ladies?

Please, Guy, I need to know. Image from King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (Warner Bros.)

I believe that where books and film/TV are concerned, this has been known to cause me pain. Cursed is a good example, which is why I’m still trying to make my way through it all these months later. But I had to catch myself — I had been saying ill of King Arthur: Legend of the Sword without actually having seen it, and as I believe, you cannot judge something unless you have personally experienced it.

Well, I’ve experienced King Arthur: Legend of the Sword now. And honestly, I’ve been laughing and crying about this for nearly eighteen hours.

Why are there giant octopus ladies in this film?

Please send cat memes.

What I’m Reading: The Silmarillion (J.R.R. Tolkien - HarperCollins) / The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln - Century Books)

What I’m Watching: Not this film anymore, and especially after having also just seen Blade, I need a minute. Mainly as I have literally just found out Zack Snyder is doing a King Arthur western. I just curled up in a ball on the floor. No judgements yet, but please no. This mythology deserves the world, and currently, I only trust David Lowery to touch any of it. That link right on to the left is my reasoning why.

Anyway, I’m emotionally and mentally drained after watching this film. It had no business being this taxing, especially when I had lowered the bar pretty close to the ground.

Shall we? We shall — if only so I can move on and try to recover. I’ma add here a link for my Charisian Writerly playlist, seasoned with Rachel Portman, David García Díaz, Harry Gregson-Williams and more for some nice, calm, soothing ambience. I especially love the first album on there, the game Arise: a Simple Story, which is even more beautiful than its music. David García Díaz deserves all the love.

Okay. Here goes it. After this movie, Guy Richie and I are on a first-name basis. That I didn’t rage-quit this movie at the ten-minute mark is a real show of strength and resilience, and I’m proud of me for it. The indisputable fact that I’m going to throw in at the start, so I don’t have to talk about it anymore, is this film is unabashedly sexist. It’s one thing for an older film to have that, because hey, some clocks, unfortunately, be broken and stuck at 1950, but this came out in 2017. Of all the women in this film, three have names, and two of them share the same name. As if they got to the second name and got stuck. I can’t comprehend how you get to the two royal wives and name them both Elsa, which etymologically, I don’t believe has any connection to the original name used for Uther’s wife — one they opted not to use — Ygraine. Like… that name was right there, and instead, they went with Elsa. I mean, maybe I should let it go, but truth be told, that is not the worst part of this. In those ten minutes alone, there was a sudden Katie McGrath (Morgana!) whose in-name name I only know because I looked it up. But there she is, a wife and mum, and helplessly following husband Vortigern with all the ‘my love’s and what-not before Vortigern goes and kills her. Like, if Morgana — or even Lena Luther from Supergirl — were there, they would have kicked his arse three times over. And then, you have other Elsa — seriously, why not Ygraine, the name was right there — who tries to flee with Uther and Arthur, gets impaled, and as she’s falling dead into the water, the upbeat main theme starts playing.

Mm-hm.

Oh, wait. I forgot, there was a Lucy, too. Three names for six female characters, that’s good, what a valiant effort. Lucy is a harlot ultimately killed off, whose a part of Arthur’s brothel — oh, we’ll get to that one. Maggie is a spy for the mages (oh yeah, there’s a mage war going on, we’ll also get to that) until she’s found out and yeeted into prison, having no further role other than to be rescued from said prison. And then there’s the lady Mage who everyone calls Mage. She’s got the most agency out of all the female characters, and she doesn’t even have a name. There’s also Vortigern’s daughter, who’s just there until she too is killed off and fed to my reason for laughing and crying for roughly eighteen hours now.

(Also, I was checking on IMDB for an actor check, and they have the actress for Arthur’s mother listed as Igraine, but no no no, that ain’t what you called her, that’s not how this works, Guy.)

This leads me to the end of that section, because this film is so infuriatingly sexist that I don’t even want to talk about it anymore, the, uh, giant octopus ladies.

So, um, I immediately left my room after seeing that, and I asked my mother if there were any giant octopus ladies in the Arthurian lore that I simply hadn’t yet encountered. She replied by offering me a look of concern, sympathy, and then walked away.

No, there are no giant octopus ladies in Arthurian lore, and no, I have no flamboodling clue from where that idea came. Every time I say it, I just… I can’t. I have lost so many brain cells in the past eighteen hours. I’m gonna reference here that two of them were meant to be very pretty, and the third was clearly meant to be as grotesque as possible. Thanks, Guy.

So, um, Excalibur. The stone. Oh, lordy, the stone. I do appreciate Excalibur being as pretty as it was, as Damascus-styled blades are always pretty but not lore-accurate. And I will concede, the attempts to make it stand out more, by giving it more power, grew on me just a little. But my initial two thoughts were, “Ooh, pretty 😍” and then, “I like nothing else about Excalibur”. That second note is clearly not set in stone (ayy, Arthurian joke), but… oh, good golly gosh, I am tired.

But the stone.

I imagine there are people out there who have tried to give the stone backstory, and hey, nature is awesome, and there’s so much you could do with it. But there was a decision made for Uther and Vortigern to fight (not traditionally brothers in the lore, but hey, what else is new?), for Uther to lose, Vortigern to be all, “Yo, I want that sword, broski,” Uther to be all, “Nah mate,” and yeet the sword up in the air, kneel forward, and let the sword impale him.

I mean, they used a nondescript hunk of stone when Arthur pulls it out (featuring a cameo from David Beckham of all people, why not?), so maybe the stone magically grew in twenty years. I highly doubt it was a case of them simply not thinking it through and, thus, not realising they had a plot-hole on their hands.

No, it was definitely the stone magically growing into a nondescript shape. It’s just common sense.

How Eric Bana and Jude Law, or even Katie McGrath got roped into this, I’ll never know. But, there was a face, the one I was looking up, and it was the woman who played Maggie — Annabelle Wallis. I spent the entire film narrowing my eyes at her, and now I realise where I know her from!

Tom Cruise’s The Mummy. Also in 2017.

Honestly, though, none of any of that is the worst part. Nothing above even comes close to being the worst part.

No, the worst part is that deep down, with glimmers of light peeking through, there’s a good movie. Like, they cut out Lancelot and inserted Bedivere instead! It just… what a gift! The music is a genuine bop, even if I’m still emotionally scarred by the timing of the main theme. And some sequences are not terrible. I was laughing, and it wasn’t even out of how bad or dead inside this film has made me. Like, I can see that good film, but there is just that much crap piled for days on top of it that I can’t even enjoy the good parts. The end was solid enough that for a second, I almost forgot the rubbish I had had to swim in for two hours. I just…

This film would have been far less emotionally taxing if it had just been terrible end-to-end. But it’s not. It’s like a birthday present you’ve wanted your whole life, but if you want it, you have to swim to the bottom of a mouldy swamp to get it, and you can’t even swim.

Oy yoy yoy.

There is also the issue (and rule number one) of establishing a series: don’t assume you’ll get a part two, and this film fails to do that. But, oh yeah, welcome back to ye boi, Mordred.

So, the opening sequence includes some written backstory about the war between man and mage. (which is in-universe called the War of Man Versus Mage, which, sure, don’t call it the Mage Wars or anything, I’d hate for the name to be interesting). And they claim that Mordred, this evil Mage that is evil, has declared war on Camelot. So, there’s a whole thing about building him up to be this grand villain, multiple sequences feature him, and then Warner Bros. cancelled the future movies. For the life of me, I can’t imagine why.

But that aside, sure, tease his presence but don’t make it so canned sequels leave the audience with promises unpaid. The clear focus was on Vortigern, so make it all about that. Leave Mordred alone until you’re ready to feature him.

Honestly, I think it’s best labelled that most of the characters in this film are characters of convenience. They’re there to serve their purpose, and then they’re sidelined, especially if they’re any of the six women. As a result, there is only one moment where I felt the emotional weight of characters, and that was between the dad and his son, the dad being one of Arthur’s friends whose name I can’t remember. But he was clearly a dying man and seeing him with his kid, I felt real emotion — as opposed to later in the film where Vortigern stabs his kid without any buildup, no relationship establishment, no loving father/daughter moments to sell his ‘grief’ when she dies. It’s the same with Katie McGrath’s Elsa, though I can somewhat forgive that — even if I can’t forgive killing Katie McGrath off, Morgana deserved better — given the overall lack of screentime.

Nothing is earned, which leads me to the first half of the film’s title and a somewhat important component of Arthurian mythology. Oh, Arthur, how ye deserve better than this. Thank the skies for The Green Knight for giving me the hope that a modern King Arthur film can be done right.

So, Arthur. Arthur, Arthur, Arthur. A kid who grew up in a Londinium brothel and ended up running it. You can tell he’s a good guy because he’s one of the few characters in the film to treat women with any level of respect, and given he barely manages that… the bar is low, lovely people, and I was still let down.

Referring to a much better adaptation, which is really saying a lot, Bradley James understood in the BBC TV show that Arthur needed to grow. As a result, in season one and, well, for most of it, Arthur was a dumbass. He was a jerk, to put it bluntly, but there was something about him that made the other characters gravitate toward him. It’s clear that, despite being a dumbass, he cares not only about being a good ruler but doing the right thing. This Arthur is… not that. When script says to be a smart leader, he’s a smart leader. When script says to reject Excalibur, he rejects Excalibur. And what likeability Charlie Hunnam does still somehow bring to the table is lost in his mishmash of a character. Honestly, this young man is less King Arthur and more a Mary Sue. His only flaws are in how poorly the script treats his character, so that’s less on Hunnam and more on the writers — including Guy.

I will give this film one thing: it’s given me ideas for my Arthurian manuscript, ones that aren’t terrible. It’s also reminded me that no matter how shit I feel about the quality of my craft, the bar is lower still. As well, I will always appreciate a film with no Lancelot. Is this film worse than Excalibur? Yes and no. I’ma need time to mull over that existential question.

But seriously, Guy, why are there giant octopus ladies?

— Charis.