Gawain is a failboat. His only solace is his lover and harlot; and alcohol. When King Arthur asks him for a story he makes this plain. He clearly didn’t understand the rules of the Christmas game and enters the danger haphazardly. Furthermore King Arthur himself pushes him outside the nest. In short: He’s a complete buffoon with zero prospects.
And it continues with him failing every encounter all the way to The Green Knight at the green chapel. And finally…
I would love to see a King Arthur/Holy Grail/Excalibur movie done in this gritty, realistic style, maybe using the book of T.H.White (The once and future king) as a basis. The best King Arthur movie (to me) was Excalibur. As a kid I was shocked about the downfall of the knights of the round table. That’s not how adventure movies should work. It was an eye opener.
On one hand, it’s absolutely stupendous piece of filmmaking. Everything is perfect. Throw every technical award at it.
On the other, 12th century poems aren’t exactly exciting to 21st century tastes.
I could totally see a test audience laughing in derision at the end of a screening. It’s a movie that 80% of the audience will utterly hate, and 20% will utterly love. It’s a movie that requires a lot of processing, and that’s something that most moviegoers simply do not want to do.
I’m utterly haunted by some of the imagery and production values. The ride away from Camelot is one of my favorite filmed sequences of the past decade. The ride across the battlefield. How in the hell is the goddamn fox so damn good? Blockbusters with budgets multiple times this have CG animals that look incredibly fake. And yet half the time I spent debating whether it was a trained fox.
Anyway, I just finished it, so I need a lot more time to process it.
I like to think Gawain’s portrait represents his dual nature. Sure, there’s vanity to hanging a big picture of yourself behind your throne, but Gawain also knows where that picture was taken and the weakness he felt in that moment.
Vanity and weakness, captured not by the brush of a painter but by nature’s light on a copper plate. And copper given time must turn green.
I wanted to watch it a second time, because the first time, there was a couple munching popcorn through the whole movie. It was really noisy and spoiled (talking about spoiling a movie) the quiet parts.
Unfortunately it was running only for 2 weeks max. This is not a popcorn movie!!!
Riding out from the city, Gawain passes a logging operation, another tension between man and nature
Gawain is equipped with pagan and Christian protection – belt and shield, respectively – but he’s traveling to the Green Chapel that embodies both
Speaking of embodying both, it’s right in the name! Is this man-thing the Green Knight or the Green Knight? I love how this character can warmly speak “well done” and then follow up with an “off with his head” and a smirk
The Green Knight seated in a temple with a stream of water flowing from him. That’s some nice Tree of Life, Water of Life imagery
When Gawain asks “Is this all there is?”, the Green Knight responds with another question, “What else ought there to be?” Could be a way of saying “no”, but I’d like to think it’s a challenge
I’m not sure what to make of the repeated upside-down imagery: the broken Mary with Child painting, the upside-down camera at the end of the giants sequence, the newly taken photograph. Do they mean more than just “ain’t our world topsy turvy?”
Just saw the movie and I am a bit lost. Half the movie felt like filler for a story that wasn’t told very well. I found the story itself to be interesting, but the movie to be beautiful, yet boring.
It seemed like everything after the duel, up until the hunter’s castle, was filler. They wanted to establish that Gawain was young and stupid, but I got that from the beginning. What was the point of him getting robbed and killed, only to not be killed. I guess so we understand the idea of “undo button” but it didn’t create a great story for me.
So he is naive, but alive, and so we jump to a Trainspotting scene just so the axe can reappear again? That wasn’t a very satisfying way to get it back, he just went for a swim because a ghost asked him to. He did good, so he got rewarded?
And then the fox and the psychedelic giants. It felt unnecessary.
I really wanted to like it, but I feel like it could have been done in a way that explained the dilemma over the cinematics.
It’s not the best told story in my opinion. Apparently there’s a lot of hidden meaning and imagery and so on that’s extremely easy to miss, but in my opinion that doesn’t make for good storytelling.
On the plus side it’s an extraordinarily beautiful film, and the acting from the lead was great despite his character not being very likeable. I don’t regret watching it, but I doubt I’ll ever watch it again.
I am still thinking about this morning, so that’s a positive note on the movie. I like it when a movie has me still thinking about it the next day. I feel like I need to watch it again, but don’t know if I will have time before my rental ends.
It was very well done and very pretty. Except, the giants, they didn’t seem to fit the rest of the move to me, and came across as a bit tacky.
I think the disjointed plot comes from the source material, at least in style if not the specific events. Arthurian legends and chivalric romances were typically a collection of several tales cobbled together to form a loose narrative. They weren’t necessarily supposed to be single chain of events where every part is building in some way towards the conclusion.
