That’s pretty much standard action movie violence, though, isn’t it?
And I actually thought the silent No-Man’s-Land fight did show empathy. The German soldier begging for his life didn’t play to me as sadistic or as a cool effect - it played as intentionally horrific, with the Duke’s Son, who had glorified war and military service, being brutally confronted by the fact that war is pretty literally hell.
The issue I had with that sequence is that it was so off-kilter from much of the rest of the movie. The movie itself couldn’t quite seem to decide if the Great War was a senseless horror, as in those scenes, or a glorious crusade, as the Duke seems to indicate later on when he says he wants to be as good a man as his son was - by super-killing the bad guy.
Yes, this is a problem. I suppose filmmakers like to offer contrasting values in the hope that some viewers will prefer one set of values presented, and other viewers will prefer an opposing set, also presented. But it comes off as annoying and unsatisfying. It’s a failure to demonstrate convictions.
As I think you mentioned earlier, straightforwardly right-wing flicks such as Red Dawn end up seeming more coherent and therefore have more success than movies like The King’s Man, which try to have it all ways.
Life is complicated, of course. And the best works of art remind us of that.
But there’s a difference between an inspired work that shows two simultaneously-existing sides of one issue, and hackwork that tosses in two opposing viewpoints in an attempt to pander to two opposing types of moviegoer.
What distinguishes them? The entire field of criticism arose, in part, to answer that question.
The King’s Men organization was created before the events of the film “The Secret Service” to prevent large scale war and such. Obviously, it didn’t work (see: WWII etcetera etcetera etcetera) and by the time of TSS The Kingsmen were just another super gagety spy organization.
But this movie was about the idealism of the founders. They had the best intentions, which ran headlong into harsh reality. The excessive violence of Galahad in TSS was a direct result of, not in contradiction of, the pacificism-got-punched-in-the-mouth reality that Arthur experienced.
That’s a reasonable message for a movie. We just disagree over whether The King’s Man actually communicated that message.
I think it was muddled by, for one thing, the obvious pleasure the filmmaker took in the many scenes of violence, which plainly were a selling point for the film, and intended to give pleasure to viewers.
If your actual message, as conveyed by the film itself, is ‘this swordplay/gunplay/way of showing people dying is totally cool,’ then the message ‘the founder is agonizing over giving up his treasured pacifism in favor of a ready-resort to violence’ just doesn’t come across.
Opinions, plainly, will differ on this. But that’s my take.
Actually, that reminds me, the weird anachronism of use of the anti-war poem Dulce et Decorum est twice in the film, without credit (or at least making as if they wrote the words), a poem published posthumously in 1920.
IIRC, they only recited the poem once - at Conrad’s funeral, when Orlando read it while staring down the King. But they used the phrase “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” very unironically at the church service before Conrad’s unit left for France.
And while they didn’t mention Wilfred Owen during the scene, he was listed in the credits.