"You have broken what could not be broken. Hope...is...broken."

I first watched this movie as a young boy age of seven. Even then I understood what 99% of what society calls men will ever truly understand, Honor.

Yes, King Arthur was only a Man and capable of Mistakes, However, the Honorable side did Prevail. Be Honorable.

I look around in today's Zombie Society @ the people most look up to and it's all just based on the money they don't care if they sell drugs, Pimp out women murder lie cheat steal as long as they can get the new Jordans or a G-Wagon( by the way they look stupid) Who do you think you are impressing a bunch of other broke-ass Wannabee's

Now instead of watching youtube all day and starring into the Abyss of Instagram Srudy Great Men they truly suffered and led Great lives maybe but highly doubtly it may rub off on your hopeless ass

‘The Past, Present and Future of Humanity’: John Boorman’s ‘Excalibur’

 John Boorman’s 1981 fantastical retelling of Thomas Mallory’s Le Morte d’Arthur is, to quote Nicol Williamson’s Merlin in the film, “A dream to some. A nightmare to others!” Often dismissed as an episodic and hammy sword and sorcery tale, it is to this writer a clever and satisfying retelling of an evergreen myth, an abstract approach that shows us Arthur’s (unnamed) Kingdom, a place out of time, in several stages of transition; from dark to golden age, via loss of innocence, and painfully bloody rebirth. Excalibur arose out of the ashes of Boorman’s earlier attempt to bring J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings to the screen (ironically after trying to get a filmic retelling of the Merlin myth off the ground). In his nominal film diary of the making of The Emerald Forest entitled Money Into Light, Boorman writes about previous productions and this might-have-been. He states that, “Tolkien’s work stirs a great brew of Norse, Celtic and Arthurian myth, the ‘Unterwelt’ of my own mind. It was a heady, impossible proposition. If filmmaking for me is, as I have often said, exploration, setting oneself impossible problems and failing to solve them, then the Rings saga qualifies on all counts.” He met his screenwriting collaborator Rospo Pallenberg in New York, “where he was working as an architect. He was trying to write scripts. I recognized a fellow spirit. I brought him to my home in Ireland and we spent six months delving with dwarfs, wallowing with the Gollum, tramping Middle-Earth with Bilbo, but, most of all, Gandalf filled my life. He was, after all, Merlin in another guise.” They spent six months putting the script together in Boorman’s home. “We had a script that we felt was fresh and cinematic, yet carried the spirit of Tolkien, a spirit we had come to admire and cherish during those months… The valley in the Wicklow hills outside of Dublin where my house sits is as close to Middle-Earth as you can get in this depleted world.” During this time United Artists, who intended to make the film, suffered several financial setbacks and got cold feet. They ended up giving it to Ralph Bakshi, who made his truncated animated version. To gain full artistic control for Bakshi’s approach, Boorman’s script was purchased by UA, for a reputed $3 million. Boorman now put his LotR prep to good use with Pallenberg in honing their Excalibur script.

Whilst Excalibur’s closing scenes are mostly wordless, the visual imagery of King Arthur being borne away by maidens to distant shores echoes thematically Boorman and Pallenberg’s scripted Rings ending, as Bilbo and company leave the shores of Middle-Earth forever. Legolas, watching from the land, remarks upon seeing a rainbow. “Look—only seven colors. Indeed the world is failing.” Pallenberg said, “From a physics standpoint it’s incorrect to say that there could be more than seven colors, but what he’s saying is ‘We live in a diminished world.’” With Arthur also gone, the age of myth and magic in his land has finally passed too.

Boorman himself said: “What I’m doing is setting it (Excalibur) in a world, a period, of the imagination. I’m trying to suggest a kind of Middle-Earth in Tolkien terms. I want it to have a primal clarity, a sense that things are happening for the first time. Lands and nature and human emotions are all fresh.”

The film almost plays like a screen Opera—it is a heightened reality, a world anew. One where sex, jealousy and pride threaten to undo the mystical balance and ties between the King and the land. A powerful aid to that feeling is the superb score which utilizes music such as Siegfried’s Funeral March by Wagner, and O Fortuna, a medieval poem set to music by Carl Orff. Boorman was determined to squeeze as much of the legend into his film’s running time as possible, chopping and condensing characters, and switching acts around. He created a three-act saga—the dark ages and the birth of Arthur, a period of brutality and superstition; the rise of Camelot and its age of reason, law, and dawning of Christianity; and the final descent into chaos and wasteland, where a frail Arthur commands the Round Table knights to seek out the Grail. Arising out of this a final battle commences for the soul of the land and the people, a sense of renewal with a promise of a new age to come. Boorman called it the “past, present and future of humanity.”

In the beginning, Uther (Gabriel Byrne) is driven by lust for Igrayne (played by Katrine Boorman, the director’s daughter), the wife of Gordois, Duke of Cornwall, and lays siege to his castle. The action first takes place in the backlot of Ardmore Studios. Uther then has Merlin transform him into the likeness of Gordois so he can have Igrayne (ravished in full armor, in front of a raging fire!) and the scene switches to night. Boorman uses a wide shot encompassing a glass matte shot of the fortress with Merlin summoning magic in the foreground to spirit the transformed Uther across the bay to the castle. Merlin has agreed to his demands, on condition Merlin can take the resulting child, Arthur. As Uther pursues Merlin and the baby after the birth, he is ambushed and drives the magical blade Excalibur, the symbol of his rule, into the stone, rather than Merlin does in Mallory’s telling.

Boorman said: “When Uther thrusts the sword into the stone and then dies, we cut straight to the same scene eighteen years later. I shot the first in Winter; then I shot it again in Spring, when all the trees were in leaf. Boom! Though it was only a seasonal change, it’s a startling one, and then I panned around with the camera, and you see that all this encampment has grown up around it (where champions joust for the right to draw the sword). That’s a passage of eighteen years in one cut, and it gave the story enormous dynamic power.” As Arthur, a mere squire, casually draws the blade for his “brother” whose own was stolen, their father reveals the truth of Arthur’s provenance, and a distant Merlin slowly comes into frame walking towards them, a sense of destiny foreshadowed now forthcoming.

Other quick cuts suggest more passage of time–a scene of young Arthur (Nigel Terry) and Guinevere (Cherie Lunghi) cuts straight to a now bearded and older Arthur meeting Lancelot (Nicholas Clay) for the first time in combat, acting rashly and proudly like Uther, breaking Excalibur upon Lancelot’s armor. The sword is cast back in the lake to be reforged, and is returned to the humbled king by the Lady of the Lake (more nepotism—Telsche Boorman).

Director Zack Snyder is a huge fan of the film, discussing its themes and techniques in the Summer 2010 edition of DGA Quarterly. “The thing about Boorman is he’s one of those rare guys who combines drama and being a visualist. The drama of the movie is clearly the most important thing to him, but the way he sees it is incredibly painterly. This is like the stylized other England you want the Middle Ages to be. It’s as if it takes place in no particular time in history. Like it’s another planet in some ways.”

He went on to later pay tribute in several ways in his Warner Bros/DC film Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice. Walter Metz illuminates:

“At the beginning of the film, Excalibur serves as the marker of Bruce Wayne’s Oedipal trauma. He cures himself of that trauma, headed from isolation as a vigilante to the community of the Justice League in future films, by passing the heroic torch to Superman… Impaled in the chest by a Kryptonite spear that Batman earlier created to kill the god he only thinks is his enemy, Superman must pull himself closer to the golem to finish the beast off. It is an exquisite reformulation of an identical scene in Excalibur. At the end of Boorman’s film, Arthur must painfully slide up the lance that impales him, to Mordred, his evil son created by an incestuous mating with his sister. Arthur slays his son and rescues England from the barren misery he has created, as does Superman rid Earth of his similarly genetic miscreant… It is the Man of Steel who redeems Batman, lifting the solution to the problem of the golem from the very film Bruce Wayne never got to see as a child.”

Lancelot, who becomes “the best” of Arthur’s knights, is a catalyst for change, an age of chivalry, and unwitting chink in the armor of Arthur and Guinevere’s marriage. From this point on, the knight’s armor becomes more gleaming and resplendent, as opposed to the blackened, ugly armor of before (almost Uruk-Hai like, as in The Lord of the Rings). Camelot grows and develops into a shining beacon of prosperity and knowledge—little details in the background also suggest this, such as a puppet show re-enacting an earlier law (“It’s to show the passage of time,” says Boorman, “and to show Arthur’s reign passing from fact into legend.”), and an Orrery, with the stars and planets revolving around Camelot.

Later, Morgana, Arthur’s half-sister, who has tricked Merlin into giving her the “secret of making,” and transformed herself into Guinevere to seduce Arthur and conceive a son, Mordred, kisses her boy (Charley Boorman) on the forehead. When the camera pulls back as their heads part, you realize ten years have passed, and Mordred is now a young man (Robert Addie), twisted with hatred by his mother to destroy Camelot and all it stands for.

Merlin, portrayed by Nicol Williamson, and Helen Mirren’s Morgana are very interesting characters. Neither actor wanted to work with the other, because, according to Boorman, each stated they wanted to sleep with the other on the set of Macbeth, and were rebuffed. Naturally, Boorman gave them plenty of scenes together to clash with enmity. Williamson based his portrayal on an old English teacher, and plays him as alternately sage and buffoonish, completely ignorant of the ways and passions of humankind. Mirren’s Morgana is of course a sensuous, scheming vamp, but subtly so within the world around her—she sees Merlin’s ways as a means for a woman to have power in a man’s world. Merlin says with melancholic insight to this upstart, “Our time is passing, and the time of man is coming. The one God is driving out the many Gods.” Boorman said of it “The forces of superstition and magic are swallowed up into the unconscious.” Her trickery of Merlin into incanting the magic that will freeze him for an epoch, the bridging of the world of magic, and of men, when he is released for one last intervention, is reminiscent of Boorman and Pallenberg’s method to illustrate the duel between Gandalf and Saruman in their earlier LotR script. Pallenberg told Ross Plesset in Outre magazine:

There’s a duel between the magicians, Gandalf and Saruman. I was inspired by an African idea of how magicians duel with words, which I had read about. It was a way of one entrapping the other as a duel of words rather than special effects flashes, shaking staffs, and all that. I tried to keep away from that a lot, and Boorman did too. [Reads from script]:

GANDALF: Saruman, I am the snake about to strike!SARUMAN: I am the staff that crushes the snake!GANDALF: I am the fire that burns the staff to ashes!SARUMAN: I am the cloudburst that quenches the fire!GANDALF: I am the well that traps the waters!

Excalibur is a ravishing film, full of lush and strange visuals, fantastical sets, and clever model photography. Boorman filmed Camelot in the countryside as simply a model placed in the distance. To suggest an air of magic in the forests around his home in Ireland where he filmed, green gel filtered lights gave it a luminous, dream-like quality, especially any time the magical blade Excalibur is drawn, or during Arthur’s discovery of Guinevere and Lancelot’s adulterous entwined naked figures, symbolically impaling Excalibur in the mossy bed between them and walking away emasculated. During the Grail quest, the grim wilderness is easily captured in the “wild” west of Ireland. Local Travelers, hardened to an outdoor life, portray Arthur’s people, fallen on hard times. The Grail Knights armor is now rusted and pitted. Sir Percival is hung up to die by Mordred on a tree and is saved by another Knight’s spur slowly, agonizingly, sawing through the rope. This is intercut with Percival’s vision of locating the Grail. “It’s the land between life and death where the Grail resides,” says Snyder. “There are a lot of cool parallels in this film, and the lighting helps establish the two realities. It’s awesome how surreal all this stuff is.” The stages of the film’s look suggest a war between design and nature, one age struggling to be born from another, a golden age from murky, earthy nature, and the eventual corruption of that.

Excalibur is a cautionary tale. The characters are all struggling to find their place in the world, to maintain harmony with nature. Merlin says poignantly of Excalibur to Arthur, “It was forged when the world was young, and bird and beast and flower were one with man, and death was but a dream.” The film is a longing for a golden age, and the struggle to balance the warring natures of honor and goodness with human greed and jealousy. Surely the most rousing image is when Percival has returned the Grail to Arthur who, rejuvenated, also recovers Excalibur from Guinevere (now a nun, to atone for her adultery with Lancelot). She has kept it safe, knowing her once and future king would one day seek its power. Merlin is unfrozen by Arthur, and even Lancelot, a raggedy wild man driven into exile by his own shame, heeds his true king’s call. Arthur rides out with his knights and these fellow warriors through a re-blossoming countryside to do battle with Mordred for the soul of the land, to Carl Orff’s stirring music.

Boorman believes myths like that of Arthur and others endure be­cause they are stories that withstand retelling. “I think it’s fascinating to see how the great European myths reemerged in the American genre film, particularly the Western. I believe that the popular, lasting stories are really about great deep psychic events in human his­tory that have bitten themselves into the racial memory and which we remember in our unconscious. The retelling of these stories is like the rediscovery of them—it ‘catharizes’ and then gives solace.”

Tim Pelan was born in 1968, the year of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (possibly his favorite film), ‘Planet of the Apes,’ ‘The Night of the Living Dead’ and ‘Barbarella.’ That also made him the perfect age for when ‘Star Wars’ came out. Some would say this explains a lot. Read more »

I wrote the original script myself, but at some point I got stuck on it. It was a bit too long and convoluted. So I got Rospo in. In the past we’d always worked together sitting in a room talking out scenes, thrashing them out, writing them down, and then revising them. But in this case I asked him to go away and think about the script and try to see if he could come up with any ideas about the structure. You see, I was determined to tell the whole story of the Morte D’Arthur, and that restricted the amount of time I had to develop the characters, the themes, and to make everything work. He did a very good job, and he actually straightened it out quite a lot, as well as coming up with one or two extremely brilliant ideas. —John Boorman