Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
For pop-cultural historians trying to chart the lay of the modern blockbuster land, a few main things can be safely agreed on. It doesn’t require much debate to reach a consensus that superheroics occupy a dominant position in terms of box-office dollars and public cachet; that aesthetics have trended toward the gritty, self-serious, and subdued, with a few exceptions buffed to a digital plastic shine; that mythology has become a method of expanding outward into spun-off properties; that a thin veneer of sexuality still informs the images of our stars while sex itself has been all but banished. This is How Things Are Now, and while the conversation over which movies brought us here can and should continue ad infinitum (it was the Marvels, I tell ya’s!), there’s one clear inflection point at which it all could’ve gone differently.
The release of the Arthurian epic Excalibur in 1981 — forty years ago this week — invites us to imagine an alternate timeline, not just of medieval fantasy but of American filmmaking’s future. Everything about John Boorman’s extravagant vision of swords and spells in the Britain of yore is anathema to the look and feel of today’s studio productions. Earthy instead of antiseptic, erotic instead of chaste, it suggests a Sliding Doors-type universe in which Hollywood’s evolution went in an unlikely, altogether richer direction. The mashup of Round Table exploits can thrill and rouse in the way that fills multiplexes, while also being pricey, strange, dense, and formally audacious through a manmade maximalism sadly absent as of late. The initial run made a modest impression on the public, with a smattering of mixed reviews and a $35 million take that placed it 18th-highest for the year. Viewed in retrospect, however, it offers a glimpse at how we could’ve had it all.
And for a minute there, it seemed like we were going to. In a 2017 essay, the critic Adam Nayman places Excalibur in a class of post-Star Wars adventures making a bid to translate the scale and thrills of that sci-fi landmark to a more mystical milieu. Legend (in which Tim Curry plays a satanic Lord of Darkness distantly related to Lil Nas X’s recent boytoy), Dragonslayer (one of the select few Disney releases to include nudity), and Conan the Barbarian (the film that made Arnold Schwarzenegger a star) all commandeered sizable budgets in the early ‘80s for their lavish renderings of ancient tales. This micro-fad fizzled out when these projects lost whopping sums of money for their studios, with the lone exception of Conan, though that profit was understood to be a testament to Ahnuld’s nascent selling power rather than the genre’s viability.
As is industry tradition, the eccentric and ambitious was traded in for the reliable and marketable, and Excalibur underscores just how much was lost in that deal. For starters, all critical assessments aside, the film performed multiple services for the public good by tapping the considerable resources of Ireland’s film economy. The capital that Boorman pumped in to the country helped to jump-start its own cinema, while showing the rest of the world that its rolling emerald hills and picturesque forests could be ideal shooting locations.
But the real discoveries were the talent, an ensemble made up of A-listers-to-be corralled right before they broke big. A post-Caligula Helen Mirren vamps it up as the temptress-sorceress Morgana Le Fay, while a pre-Star Trek Patrick Stewart (you can still see the slightest hint of hair on his iconic cueball) passes through the film as a tertiary king. Three of Ireland’s finest thespians were plucked from the stage and given a shot on screen; we have this odd, wondrous film to thank for the careers of Gabriel Byrne, Ciarán Hinds, and one Liam Neeson.
They’re all jam-packed into an unusually difficult-to-follow reading of the King Arthur story cycle, a script focused more on the knotty dynamics between conniving throne-seekers than exploits of knightly derring-do. No dragons or tree-people to battle here, just about six concurrent plots splayed out over one hundred and forty-one full minutes. That hefty run time is due in part to a preamble explicating Arthur’s origin as the bastard son of a Duke’s wife and a ne’er-do-well conspiring with Merlin to assume the face of her husband and knock her up. Merlin keeps the resultant boy Arthur in exchange, then it’s a smash cut to black, and he’s a gawky young buck ready to jimmy his lance out of the stone. From there, we get a love triangle, an incestuous deception, a couple solid sex scenes, a few duels, a lot of face-time with second-stringers like Perceval and Lancelot and Gawain, an accidental self-stabbing, and a quickie search for the Holy Grail stuffed deep in the second act.
The archaic dialect muddles matters, illogic reigns, and magic can be made to fulfill any needs of the narrative at any time. Arthur shatters his famed sword in one early scene, only for the Lady of the Lake to pop her head in and repair it for him mere moments later. Characters alter their appearances to that of another character on two separate occasions, and flashbacks don’t always clearly delineate themselves from the story’s present. A Boorman initially wanted to adapt Lord of the Rings, and it can sometimes feel like he compressed the nine hours of Peter Jackson’s multi-installment saga into nearly two and a half.
The good news is that any trouble following the winding, discursive journey of Arthur and Co. doesn’t have to detract from enjoyment of a film that tends to prioritize the grandeur of its images. Every frame looks like the cover art to a lost-classic prog-rock album, the deep-focus shots crammed with detail arranged in clean, painterly compositions. Cinematographer Alex Thomson garnered the film’s sole Oscar nomination for his well-placed flourishes of 15th-century surrealism, as in one breathtaking sequence that follows Arthur and his men on horseback, galloping through a corridor of trees that instantaneously bloom as they pass, “Carmina Burana” blaring on the soundtrack. It’s an impressive effect achieved without computerized assistance, a handicap that also makes the film’s liberated relationship to color into a more considerable feat. Splashes of green and orange light glint off of everything reflective, sometimes bathing the actors’ faces in unnatural, gorgeous hues. The aura could be best articulated as a godly glow, befitting Arthur as the harbinger of Christianity to a Britain still subscribing to supernatural superstition.
“Every frame of Excalibur looks like the cover art to a lost-classic prog-rock album.”
That the closest successor to the film’s hyperviolent, hypersexual, sibling-banging legacy would be Game of Thrones is a real bummer, and not just because this brand of over-the-top medievalism has been scuttled to TV. HBO’s crowd-pleaser may have conquered the mainstream to an extent that Boorman’s big swing could not, but it did so by draining all the color (both literal and figurative) from the original example. The show’s militant dourness leaves no room for the awestruck wonder that defined the spate of ‘80s fantasies, the sheer verve somewhere between the theatrical and the operatic. Excalibur, in particular, does what studio tentpoles ought to do, and fosters just a touch of the unwieldy in its appetite for greatness. Boorman’s reach extended just past the limits of his grasp, and challenged audiences to keep up — a challenge the American moviegoer is still ready to take on.
Charles Bramesco (@intothecrevassse) is a film and television critic living in Brooklyn. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Nylon, Vulture, The A.V. Club, Vox, and plenty of other semi-reputable publications. His favorite film is Boogie Nights.
