I do so love these Blast From The Past reviews where I take a look back at films from all different timeframes of cinema. I’ve done the very recent history with movies like La La Land, and I’ve gone back to the beginning of Hollywood with flicks like The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari.

Today, I’m going back, but not TOO terribly far, as this is a movie that came out in my lifetime, albeit before I was even a year old. Today’s movie is the 1981 outing Excalibur!

I remember my swords-and-sorcery loving father absolutely adoring this movie when I was a child, though I never sat and actually watched it with him. I just know he talked about it and had big feelings. This and anything Conan and Thor from Marvel Comics. Those were a few of his favorite things. So today we are honoring his memory by watching one of those.

Excalibur is based on the very old text, “Le Morte d’Arthur”, a collection of stories from the Arthurian legends. I never read it, even though I took a lot of lit classes in college. Kind of wish I had, as it could have been a great time. The movie starts off pre-Arthurian, dealing with Arthur’s father Uther and the events leading up to the future king’s conception. From there, we skip forward in time to Arthur’s “boyhood” (where he is played a fully grown-ass man) where he pulls Excalibur from the stone and becomes the king of unified England.

After that, we are treated to the formation of the Knights Of The Round Table, the founding of Camelot, and the vengeance of Arthur’s half-sister, Morgana. It’s Arthur’s entire existence, all wrapped up in with one cinematic bow!

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+ Nicol Williamson as Merlin is the star of the show here. He is chewing all the scenery in the very best way that an actor can. He adds the moments of levity that this film occasionally needs to break the mood because aside from him, this is a pretty solemn and joyless picture. But luckily, you’re occasionally getting Merlin being snarky or smirking or saying something coy, and it evens out the tone of the film and keeps things moving along.

Being an older actor from a previous generation–and being a British actor at that–I am unfortunately not well-versed in Williamson’s career, and that feels like a shame. According to his Wikipedia filmography, the only other movie of Williamson’s that I have seen is… sigh… Spawn. Which was his last film, no less. I will have to make a mental note to find some of his starring roles and see if I can catch up on the outings of his, because I really am just THAT impressed with how well he did here.

+ At nearly two and a half hours, Excalibur is appropriately epic in scope and feel. This covers King Arthur’s whole life (and pre-life!), and it makes the most of its runtime and never slows down. I could see an argument for either direction–that the movie too long or too short–but I personally think the run time was spot-on. I was caught up in the film the entire time, and I never got bored. At the same time, I feel like it did an admirable job covering the life of such an important mythological figure.

In a weird way, watching Excalibur got me even more excited for Christopher Nolan’s upcoming epic, The Odyssey. This is a gold standard for how the handling of mythos should be done, and given what I know about Nolan’s talent and dedication, I’m excited to see how he handles something equally exciting and epic in scope.

– Mordred is set up as the ultimate antagonist to a 141 minute film, and he is just so effortlessly dispatched. In fact, the whole climax feels rushed through once we get there. I know this flick had several mini-stories along the way, but still… it ends up feeling anticlimactic. Arthur stabs Mordred with Excalibur, and that’s the end of that. I guess it plays into Morganna’s spell that Mordred would never be hurt by weapons forged of man, but still… I expected more of a final confrontation.

This kind of flies in the face of what I said earlier about the movie being just about a perfect run time. But I personally would have shuffled some of the earlier stuff around, shortened a few matters, and added more to Arthur and Mordred’s encounter. And adding another five minutes would not have hurt anyone, either.

– The audio quality isn’t the best here, and the obviously and frequently ADR’ed dialogue doesn’t help anything other than making the mouths not match on occasion. A lot of moments, it’s hard to make out what is being said. The background score and ambient noise occasionally drowned out the dialogue. I might have been able to abide by this if I had watched it with my headphones on, but that thought did not occur to me until halfway through the film. I didn’t imagine it was a picture where wearing them would make a significant difference. That’s on me, I suppose.

OVERALL

Wow, I did not expect to enjoy this as much as I did–memory of dad be damned–but Excalibur is as total blast to watch, even forty-plus years after the fact. I was worried that, at 140+ minutes, this movie might eventually start dragging or feeling a little laborious. But no; while I wouldn’t say it flew by, it was always interesting, and my attention never waned. The cast is pitch perfect, too, with Nigel Terry standing out as Arthur, and modern legends like Helen Mirren and Patrick Stewart having roles, too. Great movie.