Excalibur (1981)

“The one God comes to drive out the many gods. The spirits of wood and stream grow silent.”

There’s just so much to talk about with this film. Just so much juicy subtext. I love it when that happens.

The whole Arthurian legend is a bit of an odd one, isn’t it? Everybody tends to think of it as the quintessentially English body of myths, yet it isn’t really English at all. The earliest texts tend to indicate that Arthur, if he existed at all, was a native Briton who fought the invading Anglo-Saxons whose culture would become English culture. And once those rather unpleasant Norman chaps invade England then we get Normans like Geoffrey of Monmouth (part-Welsh, part-Norman) using the Arthurian legends as a sort of propaganda vehicle, to remind the English that they’re invaders too. Personally, I’m just Cornish enough to be on the fence when it comes to all that stuff.

But come the 12^th century we get the Troubadours, Chrétien de Troyes and all that stuff, including a rather large amount of new stuff (the Grail, Lancelot, etc) and removing the rather awkward Celt vs. Saxon ethnic conflict, to the point that the stories which form this film belong more to French literature than to English or Welsh.

This film is loosely based on the Morte d’Arthur, a selection of certain Arthurian myths by Sir Thomas Mallory in the 1470’s. How loosely I can’t say; I’ve not read the book since uni and that was a good while ago. But it’s interesting that the armour and general look of the thing seems to reflect the time of the book rather than the actual 5^th or 6^th century setting of the original legends. Then again, the historical basis of Arthurian myth is so vague that there’s no point in attempting anything like historical accuracy. It’s also interesting to note that Mallory was a highly dodgy sort and a convicted rapist. It’s interesting to bear this in mind when we consider how the film deals with sex, which we’ll come to in a bit.  

This movie is so postmodern and metatextual that I had a massive grin on my face through most of it. The characters aren’t one-dimensional by any means (the whole Guinevere / Lancelot adultery subplot proves that) but they’re very much characters from myth, larger-than-life people who belong in epics, and necessarily so. Otherwise it wouldn’t be possible to have such a fast pace and cram so much in. There’s a bit of fun to be had within this, though. Uther, for example, is as thick as two planks in exactly the way that many characters from myths would be if fleshed out. He makes a great contrast with Merlin, who is the only character with a modern sensibility and clearly an audience identification figure, right up to the point that he's conspiring with the audience in seeing these mediseval  personalities as a little absurd. Nicol Williamson portrays his wit, cynicism and delicious irony perfectly. He’s a slippery, postmodern individual who seems completely out of place in this genre and this, of course, makes him perfect as a wizard.

The nature of his “magic” is interesting, too, quite aside from the fact that he’s shown to be a druid-like figure, one of the last of an older, pagan age. All this talk of “The Dragon” seems very similar to the Force, and that strange dream sequence with Arthur and Merlin in the forest glade seems suspiciously like a slight mickey take of the similar scene with Luke and Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back. In fact, the whole take on mythology here seems to owe quite a lot to Star Wars, although always with a slight hint of the tongue-in-cheek.

Everything looks great, with lots of fog, stone circles, Cornish landscapes, and an interesting mix between Mediaeval grottiness and a more romantic take, with the knights all having very shiny armour indeed until it symbolically all seems to dull after the funny business starts between Lancelot and Guinevere. There are some nice scene juxtapositions, too. Uther rapes Ygraine at the exact moment that her husband dies (by being impaled by a massive phallic symbol!), and we constantly switch between scenes. Both events are extremely violent, and the Duke dies at the exact moment that Uther orgasms, and Arthur is conceived.

Different Arthurian tales almost trip over each other in this bizarre portmanteau of a film, so fast is the pace, but things take a turn for the dark once Lancelot and Guinevere get naked and Merlin is trapped by Morgana (Helen Mirren looks disturbingly young). Without Merlin, things start getting very, very surreal, and the Holy Grail stuff is extraordinarily weird. Percival’s being asked questions about the grail, and his temptation in the castle, have got to be a deliberate nod to the then-recent Monty Python and the Holy Grail, while the sight of a knight surrounded by peasants with plague can only be a nod to The Seventh Seal. This film may play it straight on the surface, but you don’t have to probe deep to find lots of metatextual fun.

Of course, the main point of all the subtext at this point is to demonstrate that Mordred is a right little shit.

Oh, and we were talking about sex earlier. Well, it’s rather interesting to look at the character of Morgana from a feminist perspective. We first encounter her as a little girl, watching her own mother being raped. Merlin is clearly an accomplice to the rape- in fact, arranging it seems to be the biggest and most draining act of magic he’s ever performed! Oh, and Uther (with Merlin’s help) has arranged a civil war in which loads of people die purely so that this can happen. All in all, it’s rather difficult not to see Morgana’s character as the revenge of the feminine against all this male violence. She entraps Merlin by asserting her feminine sexuality. She shuns the male world of fighting and turns to magic. She symbolically deceives Arthur and has sex with him to produce Mordred a rather symbolic act of revenge of Arthur who, as king, is the ultimate symbol of patriarchy. Oh, and if magic is feminine, what does this say about Merlin? He certainly seems to show no interest in women! I’d better stop there. I do have a y chromosome, after all. I wonder how much of this, if any, is intended as a commentary on Mallory’s own history as a rapist?

Oh, and all this stuff with the lady of the lake is fascinating. It seems to hark back to old Iron Age habits of leaving bits of treasure in lakes and rivers as offerings to the gods, something which possibly continues in Britain today with coins and fountains. Is this “lady” a goddess, part of Merlin’s world, and soon to vanish, just as Arthur vanishes, across the sea to the west just like the end of Lord of the Rings?

Doctor Who: The Doctor's Daughter

“Hello, Dad!”

Wow. I was expecting this to be average-to-good going by my memories, which are fairly recent, after all. Stephen Greenhorn’s last effort was a bit meh, too. And yet this has just blown me away. It’s superb.

Martha’s back, which means some great character stuff for all the regulars (back to that in a bit), but also a larger TARDIS crew, which allows for what feels like an uber-traditional episode of Doctor Who. In fact the first five minutes see our heroes split up and separated from the TARDIS, and Martha’s experiences and those of the Doctor and Donna mirror each other for the early part of the episode. The Hartnell vibes couldn’t be much more blatant. And the whole thing feels very “trad Who”.

The pre-titles teaser is fab, of course, and so’s Georgia Moffat. And the Doctor’s reaction to the fact that he has a daughter leads to some superbly played scenes with Tennant and Tate. Donna as a character is fantastic here, able to take the proverbial out of the Doctor as no one else can. I still love her. Oh, and she’s the one who works out the mystery at the end. She’s great, but by now it’s becoming clear that her arc is building up to something. She can’t carry on having this much fun and being this fab without being brought down to Earth with a bump- her final comment to Martha about wanting to travel in the TARDIS forever makes it clear that something’s coming. Such is how the RTD universe works. That’s what happened with Rose back in Season 28- again, RTD repeating his own tropes, and again, not a problem at this point but it’s clear that RTD’s song will end soon.

Martha gets an interesting character arc here; initially reluctant to travel in the TARDIS because she’s aware there’s always a cost, she’s soon enjoying herself anyway (“I love this bit!”). And she proves to be brilliant, even more so than before, as symbolised by her insistence on using her medical skills to help with the dislocated shoulder of one of the Hath who’s captured her. Shades of The Smugglers there. She’s also brilliant in the way she takes the alternative route over ground to the mysterious “Source”. Shades of The Five Doctors there. And yet… only one non-redshirt dies in the whole story, and it happens on Martha’s watch as the Hath dies saving her. Martha is heartbroken; symbolically, she suffers this but Donna doesn’t, having fun down below. This is innocence versus experience; the dark side of time travel will catch up with Donna one day. It’s a good proper farewell for Martha, though. Fittingly, both of them finally address each other as “Doctor” as they part.

Jenny is an extremely cool character. Her personality is a bit superficial, perhaps, but that doesn’t necessarily mean she’s underwritten. She’s cool; a kind of Doctor-in-training who can dance through laser beams and gets a great ending. Plus, she’s a proper Time Lady. She’s got two hearts and, er, she was loomed. Sorry.

There’s some good stuff for the Doctor, too- Tennant is particularly good here- with some interesting revelations about his having fathered children, plural. And yet… there’s something not quite right about the extreme pacifism he displays here, especially at the end. I know I keep banging on about this, but this Marathon has shown that the Doctor may feel guns cramp his style, but he’s happy to use them when absolutely necessary, or even if not, if he’s in Frontier in Space. Plus there’s the blowing stuff up, and the Venusian Aikido. All this stuff about the Doctor being an uber-pacifist only came along very late, if at all.

And yet… could that be what we’re supposed to think? The exchanges with Jenny about war, which he doesn’t entirely win, suggest it might be. Could it be that this Doctor retains some of the war-weariness from the Time War, and that this is causing him to exaggerate his pacifistic streak?

Lots of food for thought here with the development of the characters. Plus, the plot is great, proper hard sci-fi, with a good twist at the end as it’s revealed how long the war’s been going on for. There’s not a lot wrong with this one. 5/5.