Excalibur

Magical Escapism

written by

BT1886

By 1981, any screen rendition of the Arthurian legends tended to arrive as either sanitized pageantry or literary prestige adaptation. John Boorman—wide-eyed and entranced by the stories since childhood—came at it from a different angle entirely. He’s on record stating the endeavor took him a decade to fully bring to life, and I think Excalibur perfectly captures that obsessive, mythical drive to render the grandness and enormity of the legend in both a physical and spiritual sense. This is a film with many faults—one I could probably critique at length. The pacing is shoddy, performances are either underdelivered or squandered, the audio mixing is poor, and it tries to do far too much. And yet I find myself mystified, resoundingly swept up in Boorman‘s epic. Behind every glittering plate of armor, every gold-bathed prop, every opulent piece of set dressing, there’s a gentleness—a genuine soul-searching—that keeps breaking through. It is, probably, the one achievement even the film’s detractors tend to concede. Excalibur’s entire visual identity is built around a supernatural overexposure that pitches this world as something far removed from our own, enchanting every element on screen. The Irish locations do enormous work here too, fusing the lushness of the landscape with an almost alien amalgamation of ever-shining crowns and armor. Trevor Jones‘s score is another one of the film’s secret weapons, amplifying the mysticism and sublimity of Arthur, his knights, and the world they’ve built and lost. Paired alongside Wagner and Carl Orff, Excalibur manages to sell its grandness through sound alone. It’s far from a perfect film. I’m not a big fan of Nigel Terry’s Arthur, and the picture strains under the overwhelming weight of trying to cover so much of the legend in a single sitting. That said, however, Excalibur is a fantastical exercise in escapism—an unwieldy, deeply overburdened endeavor from Boorman in his attempt to bring the myth to life. That overly ambitious human spirit is rendered beautifully on screen.