So, what have we here? A fancy English film director, whose big break was a mediaeval romance in the 1980s, is due to make a film based on a comic-book character inspired by mediaeval myth and legend (i.e. the Eddas, and so on). And at the same time a man whose really big break came with making films about comic-book characters (though, yes, he had done The Usual Suspects and Apt Pupil and so on) is now due to re-make a 1980s film based on a mediaeval romance - albeit a film that arguably introduced the entire Matter of Britain into the world of comic-books and into the "Sword and Sorcery" genre.
The real genius of Excalibur, as with any proper modern rendering of a classic work, is that John Boorman picked up Malory's dog-eared, 500-year-old blockbuster and steadfastly refused to admit that it was boring. Yes, there are lots of boring bits in it. Yes there are hundreds of footling minor characters, the plot goes hither and yon, and the author probably didn't know very much about ancient British mysteries or Jungian mythic archetypes. But hey! It's got wizards, magic swords, magic forests, magic caves, magic castles, handsome knights galloping to battle in shining armour, damsels in distress (and various states of undress), lots of violence... and lots and lots of SEX. Throw in a bit of mumbo-jumbo about the King and the Land being one, and with a pinch of Carl Orff and lashings of Wagner you've got yourself a pretty sharp movie.
Yes, arguably Excalibur only really wins because the overwhelming majority of King Arthur films have been rubbish. Hollywood, sadly, tends to be scared of things they think people won't know about. So re-packaging Arthur, Merlin and Guinevere and the rest as a sub-sci-fi genre piece was a smart move. It wasn't even meant to be King Arthur in the first place. It was meant to be Tolkien (according to Boorman himself in a recent Indie interview). And of course Tolkien was another one of those things that Hollywood used to be scared of.
But then the lesson of every superhero movie made in the last three decades is that a pop cultural phenomenon (such as Superman or Spider-Man) really has to have been around for forty years or more before Hollywood is comfortable enough with it to allow a "proper" film to be made. Why else did we have to wait until the late '70s for the Man of Steel? Why did we spend the '80s enduring drivel like Legend and Willow and Krull and Dragonslayer and God-only-knows-what, when what everyone really wanted were hobbits and High Elves and Mordor and the One Ring? (To be fair, Conan was a pretty good film-version of Conan, who by then had more than done his pre-Hollywood four decades: famously poorly reviewed by Time with a single line - 'Star Wars... as done by a psychopath!' - it's hard to imagine that the original psychopath Robert E Howard himself would have disapproved.)
Well, for better or for worse, the Jackson films (as I feel compelled to refer to them) have most likely burst Hollywood's fantasy dam once and for all. In the long term Middle-earth itself seems likely to become one of those gifts that just keeps giving. (Personally in my lifetime I'm predicting Turin and Lúthien and bloody Gondolin. But never mind!) And given that The Hobbit is now held up, it's presumably time to have a crack at Malory again.
Singer, as it happens, is not the only one going back to Camelot for his movie magic. In the last couple of years we've had King Arthur (though really we'd rather we hadn't) and the enjoyably silly The Last Legion, both giving utterly ahistorical "historical" versions of the Once and Future King. Now, as Splash Page puts it, we've got 'a surprising amount of comics-savvy creators flocking to the Arthurian legend in some way, shape or form.'
Just last month, it was revealed that "Transmetropolitan" writer Warren Ellis is scripting a currently untitled King Arthur movie. Ellis noted on his blog that his project is different from Singer's, effectively dispelling any hopes that the one-time "X-Men" director and the "Astonishing X-Men" writer would be in cahoots on the same film.
But Ellis isn't the only comics writer taking a stab at the Arthurian legend. For some time, "Y: The Last Man" scribe Brian K. Vaughan has been attached to "Roundtable," an action-comedy update on the King Arthur story that has Merlin assembling modern-day knights to combat an ancient villain. Clearly, this isn't the film that Singer is set out to make, either.
And that's still not the only Arthur-inspired film that has comic book roots. John Woo is still attached to direct "Caliber," another retelling of the Arthurian legend, but set in the American Wild West. Based on a Radical Publishing miniseries, the story focuses on a magical pistol meant to be used by only one man—just like Excalibur and its wielder, King Arthur.
It's not hard to understand the appeal of the Arthurian mythos to comics-minded people: there's the mythical aspect, a plethora of dynamic characters and the chance to reinterpret a classic legend. But with Singer, Ellis, Vaughan and Woo all working on different King Arthur projects at the same time, it's almost too good to be coincidental. Somewhere out there, Merlin is most assuredly working his magic.Well, best of British luck to all of them, I say. The Rings books may have been ruined for a generation of fans, but King Arthur, whether he ever really existed or not, has genuinely stood the test of time. It'll take a good deal more than a bit of wobbly CGI to finish him off once and for all.
