Man, you are *really *into Benjamin Button, aren’t you? 
Ah.
I personally found it refreshing that the movie wasn’t yet another vehicle for christianity and had it’s own take. It’s possible that they were just trying to avoid overtly religious themes though.
So many great comments by all who have posted.
I agree w/ Torpor Beast that I was GLAD they left out the Christianizing moral, which always struck me as an overlay on an ancient story. “The King and the Land are One” seems to me a primal truth that would have been part of the pre-Christian version.
Salinqmind brought up the strange Sam Neill movie “Merlin”. I agree it was very striking to look at. IMO, where it went wrong was to harp on a strong theme of making the ancient Goddess religion the villain. I kept thinking, talk about not knowing your target audience! Who do they think goes for the Arthur lore, if not the neo-pagan crowd? That’s why Mists of Avalon was such a big hit, although it was so long and repetitive, and the movie version was laughable. Funnily enough, the MoA book actually reminded me of Atlas Shrugged in being so heavy-handed in its ideas. I ended up skimming most of the last third.
But back to Excalibur. Awesome movie. My copy is VHS, need to upgrade to DVD one of these days. My only gripe seems to be one no one else shares, which is that I thought the casting of Lancelot SUCKED. Right off the bat there was his cheesy 80s hairstyle (same hairstyle that bothered me on the hero of another otherwise brilliant movie, Dark City). But there was nothing about him in looks or acting that evoked Lancelot for me.
And rape her mother, and unlike her mom, she knew the disguised Uther wasn’t her father.
To McGeek & TorporBeast re: the Grail. You’re probably right that Boorman was trying to avoid overtly religious themes, and that the Grail seems like an overlay. I kinda see it as a different story with the same cast of characters. That’s why I think it doesn’t work to hammer it into the Excalibur storyline.
To de-christianize the Grail is like de-christianizing Handel’s Messiah. Possible, but then it’s a different story.
(Although I seem to be harping on this point, I’m really not some fundy whackjob. Really.)
My favorite movie for, lo these many years.
One of my favorite touches:
When the dead body of Cornwall is brought back to his castle, little Morgana reaches over and closes his eyes. Later, Uther says to Igraine, “She looks at me with her father’s eyes.” And later, when Merlin first meets the adult Morgana, he tells her,“You have your father’s eyes.”
OK, more about the Grail. Oh, stop rolling your eyes.
I was just reading the Wikipedia article about the Fisher King: he’s the guardian of the Grail, lives in a castle, has a Wound That Does Not Heal (so all he can do is sit in a boat and fish), and his land is desolate and barren, until he & his land are healed by the Grail.
So Boorman basically made Arthur fill the role of the Fisher King. Interesting choice, and it makes a little more sense now.
He also gave the Wound That Does Not Heal to Lancelot.
(In The Natural, Roy Hobbs has a WTDNH).
I do see what you are getting at. I guess I didn’t make it clear that I seriously doubt the Grail was part of the Christian overlay of the story. I would bet any money that there was a grail, i.e., some form of chalice of blood in the earlier pagan version. The obvious indicator being that I’ve never heard of any Grail legends in any other cultures which are now Christian. Nor is Grail mythology part of any mainstream Christian sect practicing today, AFAIK. I’m protestant, and have close friends who were raised catholic and eastern orthodox, etc. Of course Communion is a bigger thing in their church than mine, but I never heard that they hold any beliefs about the communion chalice holding mystical properties like healing, etc. That seems peculiar to the culture that gave rise to Arthurian legends. So again, my bet is that this was part of some pagan belief system that the Christians co-opted when they took over that part of the world.
Don’t worry, I wasn’t thinking you are a fundamental-case 
Hey, cool! As often as I’ve seen the movie, that common thread never occurred to me. To add to it: When the Duke dies on his raid against Uther’s army, it’s because his horse has been scared by a flock of ravens or crows (Merlin’s familiars). When he’s thrown against the rack of spears, he dies at the very moment of Arthur’s conception… with his eyes open.
I’m not sure that there was any actual “earlier pagan” version of the Matter of Britain. Yes, there are similar stories from, for example, Welsh legends that were co-opted into the Arthurian legends – but those tales bear little semblance to even Geoffrey of Monmouth’s tales, and almost none at all by the time the whole Arthurian cycle is developed in Le Morte d’Arthur or the Vulgate.
In short, I believe that casting Arthur with a pagan veneer is a popular neo-pagan(ish) innovation. The Arthur cycle as we’d recognize it has always been a Christian tale, because the people who wrote it down were Christians trying to say things about Christianity.
And that’s about the only thing about Excalibur that I find lacking – it makes some obvious references to Christianity, and some nods to the “old (pagan) gods” going to sleep, but it stripped out the very Christian nature of Arthur, Lancelot, and Perceval that made their tales make sense.
However, the movie is gorgeous, the acting is mostly quite good, and the score is grand. I particularly like the montage of the last ride of Arthur to war, as their armor is once again shiny, the land is blooming, but blossoms are falling on the wind as the music plays.
[quote=“Lightray, post:50, topic:516939”]
I’m not sure that there was any actual “earlier pagan” version of the Matter of Britain…
In short, I believe that casting Arthur with a pagan veneer is a popular neo-pagan(ish) innovation. The Arthur cycle as we’d recognize it has always been a Christian tale, because the people who wrote it down were Christians trying to say things about Christianity…
Well, of course you could be right, but for me that interpretation still does not add up.
I’ve been a fan of Arthurian-esque stories since I was in grade school, definitely read Mallory’s version, as well as the Once & Future King, Sir Gawain & the Green Knight, The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills, and who knows what else before graduating high school. I graduated in the 70s so this was before the movie Excalibur was released, as well as before I’d ever heard of Wicca or other neo-pagan movements.
Through all that reading, the Christan parts of the tale always seemed forced and added on to me. (It makes me think of the Sarah Silverman line “Jesus is Magic!”). Like a commercial from the sponsor – yeah yeah, Sir So-and-So prevailed because he behaved like a good Christian, and the Grail healed because it was Jesus’ cup. Now back the the real story.
Again, the whole Grail mystique thing wasn’t part of Chritianity anywhere else any time before that AFAIK. So where did that come from, if it was not borrowed from local legends? I agree that neo-pagans can go overboard in their claims, but it doesn’t seem that nutty that before Christianity arrived, there might have been mystic practices involving a vessel of blood, and a body of folklore to go along with that.
I always saw it as akin to TV programming or movie censorship in the mid-20th century, under which TVs and films were all constrained to reflect a certain moral code, even if that meant seriously altering the source material. That is, the people who passed down the Arthur cycle were telling old stories, but because of the situation, changed some details to fit Christian values. After all, who would be in a position to write down anything in those times? Mainly only inhabitants of monasteries. So no wonder all the “commercials” and product placements in the written version of the Arthur cycle were for THEIR product.
I have to admit that before today, it never occurred to me that others felt the opposite way - that they felt the grail story is intrinsically Christian, that the Grail started out as a Christian element of the story, with no precursor in earlier pagan tales. Naturally they could be right, since I am admittedly not a true scholar on these matters. I’m just saying it never would have occurred to me.
The closest I would have thought it might come to being original is if it were something like a “cargo cult”, where superstitious people who have been converted to Christianity by missionaries, cannot easily relinquish their superstitious ways, so they develop a superstitious version of Christianity. Do you consider cargo cults to be Christianity? I don’t. Guess that’s ethnocentric of me, but on the other hand that is a good argument for why Christians should not be trying to force their religion on other cultures, because what they’ll get is not going to be Christianity. (Anyone see “At Play in the Fields of the Lord”?)
OK, sorry I’ve gone on so long. To sum up, you may be absolutely right, but maybe Boorman should be cut some slack because he may have read it as I did, and may have honestly been trying, not to “de-Christianize the Grail”, as someone posted earlier, but re-paganize it. Just my $0.02.
The only obviously christian bit in Arthur’s tale is the Grail legend which, for all we know, was invented in the 12th century by Chrétien de Troyes. The Welsh tale of Peredur, which tells a second, possibly pre-dating version of the story of Percival, doesn’t even mention the Grail.
Some scholars think that the Grail is based on Bran the Blessed’s magical life-giving cauldron. Myrddin Wyllt as Merlin also strangely plays big part in the supposedly “christian” tales of Arthur.
To me the legend of Arthur seems to be a collection of myths from different sources, given later christian veneer by Chrétien de Troyes etc. who would obviously attribute the mystical happenings in the myths to the christian god. Also, Chrétien was a poet and a troubadour, not a theologician, so it’s highly improbable that he was trying to impart some great truths about christianity, rather than spin a convincing tale.
Keep in mind that we’re not talking pre-historic unwritten legends, when discussing the Grail. They mostly sprang up in written form from known authors (Chretien de Troyes, primarily) in the 12th century. He most likely borrowed some elements from Irish and/or Welsh legends of magical bowls, but it’s not like ancient legends were adapted to fit a new audience.
Hey…simulposts, kind of. Slightly different interpretations.
OK, thanks to Torpor Beast and jsc1953, I learned something today: so the Grail was not part of folklore, it really was part of the phony-feeling added-on Christian stuff.
Still feels phony to me - I like Boorman’s version better!
I’m not saying that the Arthurian cycle doesn’t steal from other sources – it does. In fact, that’s kind of stereotypical of Christian legends – they’re almost all swiped from other sources. The Holy Grail is just as Christian as Easter eggs.
But, the Frankenstein monster that was assembled out of those parts is there to talk about Christian themes. Not modern day Christian themes, to be sure. But ones that were important to their medieval audience.
Exactly. Peredur and Perlesvaus are so divergent that it’s difficult to call them the same character.
The Crystal Caves, The Hollow Hills, The Once & Future King – those are all derivative of the sources (which don’t really all agree with each other, anyway), and the emphasis and attention of their authors focused elsewhere in the tales they were telling. I’m not surprised you thought any Christian parts of those seemed forced and added on. I find the pagan emphasis in The Mists of Avalon to be trite and forced, for much the same reason.
Many of you might enjoy the novel Arthur Rex by Thomas Berger, best known for Little Big Man. I discovered it at almost the same time I first saw Excalibur, and they compliment one another. Berger has a slightly tongue-in-cheek but basically respectful approach to Arthurian legend, and it’s quite an engaging book. His retelling of the tale of Gawaine and the Green Knight is itself worth the price of admission.
That’s how I feel. But I’m not quite satisfied with Nicol Williamson, personally.
IMDb says Boorman wanted to make LOTR, but he couldn’t get the rights, so he made this instead! Imagine what his LOTR would’ve been like! And
Heh. Nicholas Clay = Legolas, maybe? 
I’ve only seen Clay in one thing since then - the Granada TV version of the Sherlock Holmes story “The Resident Patient,” in which he played the struggling young doctor.