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I’ve been saying for a couple years now that the fantasy
genre is unmoored. It’s basically
a slogan of these articles because it lets me talk about form and style and
genre history, the stuff I know the most about. However, I’m starting to wonder how true that actually is
anymore. After a decade at the top
of the blockbuster fantasy has definitely receded in the 2010s, producing fewer
Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings level sagas in comparison to the success of
superheroes and sci-fi properties.
That translated to a thoroughly unsure nature for the first
few years of the decade, especially when it turned out The Hobbit wasn’t as successful as everyone was gearing up for it
to be. However, as we pass the
midpoint of the decade and begin the slow trickle towards its twilight years
it’s starting to seem more and more like the new defining affect of fantasy is
what I call Number Zero stories.
I’ll get into what that means in a little bit but there’s no greater
example of it than the fact WB is giving Guy Ritchie the reigns of a new big
budget King Arthur movie.
There’s a lot to unpack here but let’s start with that term
I threw out just now: Number Zero stories. This is a pretty broad reaching term I came up with in 2013
to explain the very large genre of seminal story from childhood that we all
know without distinctly remembering where we first encountered it. This extends from fairy tales like Snow
White or Jack and the Bean Stalk to children’s literature like Alice in
Wonderland or Peter Pan to mythology like the story of Hercules or the Minotaur
to the bible stories of Noah and Moses to even well known monster narratives
like Frankenstein or Dracula.
Like I said, it’s a purposefully broad term meant to be all
inclusive of the massive amount of fantasy blockbusters we’ve had this decade
that seem to be riding this particular wave. Pretty much since 2010 we’ve had a slew of these movies
filling up the box office and while I, and many like me, initially wrote them
off as a meandering fad that would die off that doesn’t seem to be the
case.
The biggest name in this sub-genre so far has been Disney,
though they only recently figured out how to leverage monetary success into
culture capital. It was Disney’s Alice in Wonderland that kicked-off this
craze in 2010 and it was their Oz the
Great and Powerful that cemented its broad appeal in 2013. Both of those films are good examples
of number zero movies that made money but didn’t make impact, as I’m pretty
sure nobody has thought about them since they happened.
So far, a lot of these movies have been that way like Jack the Giant Slayer, Dracula Untold, Clash
of the Titans, Pan, and Mirror,
Mirror. However, in 2014
Disney managed to find a winning combination with Maleficent, a bizarre fantasy rape revenge film driven almost
entirely by the politics and vision of Angelina Jolie. That movie proved that it was possible
to turn Number Zero material into cultural capital through a driven and unique
directorial aesthetic, a trick they pulled off again with Cinderella in 2015 and The
Jungle Book this year.
Guy Ritchie’s King
Arthur: Legend of the Sword seems to be the first major attempt by an
outsider to follow up on Disney’s lead.
We’ve seen components of the Disney outlook this year, like Warcraft gave Duncan Jones massive
freedom for his vision but he wasn’t re-imagining some massively notable
classic, meanwhile Huntsman: Winter’s War
lacked a unique creative vision to drive its identity, emphasizing the visual
aesthetics above all else. In that
respect it has something in common with King
Arthur: Legend of the Sword as both films are really pushing their unique
visual language and how different it is from the standard fantasy palette.
That seems to be a more and more common affect of high
fantasy films in the 2010s, that is to say movies that revolve around kings,
wizards, knights etc. They
aesthetic niche that’s emerged is a weird blend of Miyazaki-esc vistas
populated with monsters pulled from across RPG, card, and video games then
painted over in Game of Thrones’
unique dirty spectrum color design.
That’s thoroughly the niche King
Arthur: Legend of the Sword inhabits, emphasizing bizarre and ornate armor
designs, giant animal monsters, and a series of demonic knights that look
straight out of the Dark Souls or Witcher playbook. It even manages to bring in some actual
actors from Game of Thrones to spice
things up.
All of that is, honestly, secondary to what I think actually
looks impressive about the film, which is how much it embraces Ritchie’s own
unique sensibilities. I’ve been a
fan of Ritchie since he first popper up in the early 2000s with a pair of
gritty, violent crime comedies in Lock,
Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. He seemed like a genuinely interesting
talent at the time whose hyper-editing style wasn’t as obnoxious as some of his
contemporaries like Michael Bay or Baz Luhrmann.
Unfortunately, Ricthie’s career didn’t really pick up till
2008 after his divorce when he finally returned to form with RocknRolla, another violet British crime
comedy. He followed that up with
the Sherlock Holmes films, which
served as Ricthie’s reintroduction to the mainstream. They also proved Ritchie was a viable blockbuster producer
despite his decade languishing in mediocrity, even if he did follow them up
with Man from U.N.C.L.E., which was a
pretty major disappointment.
That kind of eclectic career ends up making Ritchie a
paradoxically mercurial talent to pin down despite being a filmmaker who
clearly values style over real substance.
His films don’t really feature much in the way of restraint or subtext
and the times where does try to inject some kind of meaning like Revolver end up laughably bizarre or
just plain uncomfortable like Swept Away. Ritchie’s best films always feature the
same aspects and commitments but that rarely sinks bellow the surface levels of
the film.
So far, King Arthur
seems to be showing a lot of good signs for a Guy Ritchie movie. The high speed editing and non-linear
storytelling of this trailer is a classic trick he loves to use and definitely
highlights how much Ritchie likes to use editing and construction to enhance
his films rather than subtext or meaning.
Additionally, the central re-imagining of King Arthur
becoming a street rat in the same vein as Aladdin seems like a very Guy Ritchie
thing to do. Like I said,
Ritchie’s most comfortable when he’s making comedic movies about violent street
level crooks so it makes sense that would seep into his King Arthur
adaptation.
At the same time, his lack of interest in plot (most of his
stories are a meandering series of scenes showcasing the characters playing off
each other) is why the film is already trying to sell itself on his editing
flourishes and the visual aesthetic of the fantasy elements on hand.
I’m not really sure I have a real point to be made here
about all these elements. It feels
like King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
has all the pieces assembled to produce an impactful fantasy blockbuster but
that I think Ritchie might end up the weak link in his own endeavor. Ritchie’s a competent director with a
lot of style but his movies have a bad habit of washing over folks and not
leaving a ton of impact.
I mean, we as a culture pretty much forgot his Sherlock
Holmes films rather quickly and it’s starting to look more and more like he
peaked with Snatch. This gets even truer if you compare his
work to that of contemporary Matthew Vaughn. Vaughn also started with elaborate British crime stories in Layer Cake but quickly moved on to major
success by revitalizing the X-Men films and giving us Kick-Ass and Kingsman. But then again, WB is hoping for King Arthur to launch a whole shared
universe of Arthurian blockbusters so even if it becomes just another good but
forgettable Guy Ritchie joint it could at least launch some more interesting
installments down the line.
King Arthur: Legend of
the Sword is scheduled for release March 24, 2017
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