The Once and Future Ring King

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!)