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It was too cold to sit in front of my computer, so we watched "King Arthur" so we'll be able to return it to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
littleredhead and groundctrl someday. Aaand you can just wander on right now if you liked this movie. I think we had fun watching it, but not quite in the way the producers would have hoped. Have determined that it is ever bit as bad as I had been led to believe.
If you ignore the beautifully finished stone of Hadrian's Wall, and the use of crossbows and trebuchets* (okay, okay, I guess it's possible they could have had them, but it just doesn't seem very damned probable to me) there's still the question of a, what?, possibly 10-year-old Arthur randomly asking, "But what about their free will?" Yeah, like that's the first thing that leaps to a 10yo's mind when shown the knights he'll lead. *eye rolls* If the monk had been giving him a lesson on free will at that moment it might have made sense, but that wasn't now it was laid out for us.
We never did find out why that one little Roman villa was up beyond the Wall. Obviously a much-beloved friend of the Pope to get such a lovely little plot of land stuck up in completely undefended territory.
And ow, how they treated their equipment. In one scene Arthur hacks a chain with his sword and some other guy (I never did figure out all their names) hacks a field-stone wall with his big axe, and it almost physically hurt me. I couldn't resist muttering "Oh, that's a nice way to use your sword." "Oh, THAT'S a nice way to use your axe!" Weapons, tools - if it's something you depend on for your life or livelihood you don't treat it like that.
Then we have Kiera Knightly walking around in bare feet and a thin dress in the snow, recovering over a few hours from what seemed near dead, taking a bath while they're camped in the snow! Talk about being tougher than a drum majorette. I feel like such a wimp, bundled up on the couch when it's 67 degrees. Yeah, yeah, I know that the Tierra del Fuego natives are supposed to be able to sleep on the ground completely uncovered and let snow fall on them, but it's notable because most people can't, and she's supposedly just recovering from near dead.
It was heartening to know that soldiers on the march couldn't catch up with slow-moving wagons full of fleeing villagers. I'll keep that in mind next time I'm a fleeing villager - it will be okay.
I guess I shouldn't even get into all the silliness of their final battle. The air was rent by cries of "But why would you DO that?! Stand back and send another couple of volleys of arrows at them!" and "He's already dead - why are you wasting your energy on crawling over there to stab him again?"
Nice ceremony they arranged at the end, there, with all the fire arrows out over the ocean and the guy who had apparently been stabbed through during the battle now all nicely recovered. Lancelot obviously had to die for that to happen because Arthur was obviously way more into Lance than Guinevere - he didn't seem particularly interested at all when she was throwing herself at him.
What was with all her weird comments about Arthur being like a fairy tale and them not being "polite people from poems"? What that meant to be some kind of clunky 'foreshadowing' kind of thing?
Oh my, I had so much fun with this movie that it's almost past my bedtime. :)
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*I just had to add 'trebuchet' to my Firefox dictionary, because, as Eor pointed out, I hate having an incomplete dictionary, especially when it comes to obscure military terms.
littleredhead and groundctrl someday. Aaand you can just wander on right now if you liked this movie. I think we had fun watching it, but not quite in the way the producers would have hoped. Have determined that it is ever bit as bad as I had been led to believe. If you ignore the beautifully finished stone of Hadrian's Wall, and the use of crossbows and trebuchets* (okay, okay, I guess it's possible they could have had them, but it just doesn't seem very damned probable to me) there's still the question of a, what?, possibly 10-year-old Arthur randomly asking, "But what about their free will?" Yeah, like that's the first thing that leaps to a 10yo's mind when shown the knights he'll lead. *eye rolls* If the monk had been giving him a lesson on free will at that moment it might have made sense, but that wasn't now it was laid out for us.
We never did find out why that one little Roman villa was up beyond the Wall. Obviously a much-beloved friend of the Pope to get such a lovely little plot of land stuck up in completely undefended territory.
And ow, how they treated their equipment. In one scene Arthur hacks a chain with his sword and some other guy (I never did figure out all their names) hacks a field-stone wall with his big axe, and it almost physically hurt me. I couldn't resist muttering "Oh, that's a nice way to use your sword." "Oh, THAT'S a nice way to use your axe!" Weapons, tools - if it's something you depend on for your life or livelihood you don't treat it like that.
Then we have Kiera Knightly walking around in bare feet and a thin dress in the snow, recovering over a few hours from what seemed near dead, taking a bath while they're camped in the snow! Talk about being tougher than a drum majorette. I feel like such a wimp, bundled up on the couch when it's 67 degrees. Yeah, yeah, I know that the Tierra del Fuego natives are supposed to be able to sleep on the ground completely uncovered and let snow fall on them, but it's notable because most people can't, and she's supposedly just recovering from near dead.
It was heartening to know that soldiers on the march couldn't catch up with slow-moving wagons full of fleeing villagers. I'll keep that in mind next time I'm a fleeing villager - it will be okay.
I guess I shouldn't even get into all the silliness of their final battle. The air was rent by cries of "But why would you DO that?! Stand back and send another couple of volleys of arrows at them!" and "He's already dead - why are you wasting your energy on crawling over there to stab him again?"
Nice ceremony they arranged at the end, there, with all the fire arrows out over the ocean and the guy who had apparently been stabbed through during the battle now all nicely recovered. Lancelot obviously had to die for that to happen because Arthur was obviously way more into Lance than Guinevere - he didn't seem particularly interested at all when she was throwing herself at him.
What was with all her weird comments about Arthur being like a fairy tale and them not being "polite people from poems"? What that meant to be some kind of clunky 'foreshadowing' kind of thing?
Oh my, I had so much fun with this movie that it's almost past my bedtime. :)
--------------------
*I just had to add 'trebuchet' to my Firefox dictionary, because, as Eor pointed out, I hate having an incomplete dictionary, especially when it comes to obscure military terms.
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I will consider myself warned.
;D
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The trebuchets, probably not so much, there is some speculation that the Vikings may have been using them but it would have been 'traction' trebuchets, rather than the counterweight form we are more familiar with and what I assume they used in the movie.
I want to give Kiera Knightley a sandwich.
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I'm pretty sure it was traction trebuchets, so maybe they're okay there. :) They seemed to be being used by the "Woads," who had just arrived on the scene and I wouldn't have thought would have had time to whack those things together, but maybe the Romans had left them there to protect the wall.