Excalibur

The 60s bore things like Persona, the 70s The Godfather; then people forgot how to act in the 80s? Even Patrick Stewart - watching him strive to yank the sword out the stone was ridiculous. Merlin was so unpleasant and unnatural, not for being a sorcerer but for being a normal guy doing a bad job at portraying a sorcerer. Ultimately it's Boorman to blame, as he's responsible for the final artistic product, but the actors shit the bed. I could tell that some of the lines weren't ill-written, just ill-delivered. In fact, I liked some of the writing; it was adventurous, outside Malory; sometimes even profound; but its delivery was almost uniformly wrong. Arthur lacked all the majesty of the legend, Merlin lacked everything that made him likable in T.H. White, and the sound/score were weird. For intense sequences they used that one Orff piece, and for tender scenes they used - I think - Tristan und Isolde; such cliches employed in such a cliche manner; and that main cello motif was annoyingly used as well. Again, I feel like artistic culture foundered in the 80s. Pop culture was pretty exciting, but the movies were brutal. Probably the best ones were just the most quintessential reflections of pop culture, like The Breakfast Club, rather than self-conscious art. Bob Dylan was decimated by the 80s as well - he should have been above it, but they sucked him in and killed him. It's a weird, shameful, lovable decade. Perhaps an artistic dearth, though I'd need to do more research before really declaring that. I can surely say, though, that Excalibur bears the stamp of the 80s in the worst way; and it's not even wallowing in synths, it's telling a timeless story with timeless music... and somehow butchering it as the 80s butchered Dylan.

Some interesting interpretation of the legend. Merlin+Morgana? That's new. Some of the grail stuff was substantially different, and the story of the sword is nearly absent from White. I don't know why they made so much up, but some of it was compelling.

T.H. White makes Lancelot hideously ugly - I wonder if that's totally his creation? I don't remember that from Malory, and it's certainly not true in the two adaptations I've seen. Lancelot here looks as elegant as he is, and I like that. It was a really interesting choice to make Lancelot so visually unpleasant in White, unless there was some reliable precedent for that. Here he's noble without all of the darkness, and it's a nice change. Guenever is also a bright spot in the film, so the two of them together rescue some of the cringe.

Maybe the most interesting change relative to White (and probably to Malory) was the arc of Merlin (magic and polytheism) to Arthur (Christianity). I didn't see that condensation of the supernatural in the texts, but Merlin expressed it explicitly in the film.