MaxK

Boom! Bang! Crash!

MaxK

I've got a nice old copy of Le Morte D'Arthur on my bookshelf and a brand new Excalibur on my DVD shelf. I can care less about this new version.

Sessa17

There is a brand new Excalibur DVD?

And why would post in, let alone read a thread about a movie you could care less about.

custom001

http://kingarthur.movies.go.com/trailers.html

New trailer is up now.

Looks good, but not too thrilling, IMO.

kcbrett5

This is a little nitpicky. Who cares if the bows were curved or not? These movies are fictions. They are about telling a story in an entertaining way. If you want historically accurate than try documentaries and the history channel.

cartman

I'd have guessed she only weighs 18 pounds.

Toth

See, then that begs the question why say "the true story" if you arn't going to go for realism... oh wait I know! BECAUSE HOLLYWOOD IS FULL OF F#$%ING LIARS. hehe that felt pretty good.

John Spartan

:lol Nice sound effect.

Have to say that costume doesn't quite work for her, though. She's more of a face & legs gal.

greenknight

Ok i just lost any and all hope after hearing these two things "Jerry Bruckheimer" and "merlin"
Obviously those hollywood grass******s were lying when they said this was the historic Arthur.

BRAISKI

This will be an interesting movie!

talemyn

Well, some longbows have the bend at the ends like a recurve . . . certainly not the older versions, but at the time the Romans had made it into England, they certainly had been around for a while and had their designs influenced and modified. The bow pictured in those shots is certainly not out of the question for the time period.

lucasorion

But it seems to be highly out of the question that she would be able to handle the pull weight required to fire an arrow at a far distance and with sufficient power (unlike in one of the previews)

Li

Saw this movie at a sneak peak. Had to sit in the third row, but the theater was small so it wasn't a huge screen.

Anyway, it's not worth your money. I enjoyed it until the last 45 minutes, in which it became a poor excuse for a LOTR battle with some incredibly poor GC armies. I felt like I had already seen it all before! I also didn't believe Keira Knightley’s character in slightest.

thephantom

It's not nitpicky. In that time period the welsh where using a medium power bow, mostly hunting bows. They primarily fought as skirmishers at the time, peppering the enemy with arrows and running away. This is some 500+ years before the longbow as we know it entered common use on the battlefield. The bows were usually made of yew, ash, and elm.

I won't discount that there may have been recurve-style bows in the area at the time, I just don't see the style being that common. The way that solid wooden bows are made just doesn't promote that design.

Looking at the one she's holding in her hand, it's pretty obvious that it is NOT of a traditional build. A wooden bow at the time would have had a draw of at least 50-70lbs and that bow would snap like a twig under that strain. The warbow that everyone calls the English Longbow had a draw of up to150lbs. However, a Mongolian or Hun composite bow made of horn and sinew would look quite similar to that and work quite well, and probably have a draw that's actually low enough for her to use. If that's supposed to be a real bow, then it's a Hun bow. While it's possible the queen might have gotten her hands on one, apparently at some point the Huns were able to equip her entire army(or maybe Guinevere was a Hun? Seems just as likely)

And the reason why I think it's an issue is because this is the so-called "True story behind the legend". There seems to be absolutely nothing true behind this, not even the weapons they used. The REAL truth behind the legend is no one knows the real truth(at least not the whole truth), and anyone saying otherwise with the certainty that Jerry Bruckheimer seems to have is BSing you.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not bashing the movie, it looks interesting enough to me. I'm just sick of Hollywood versions of real or supposedly real events. There's gonna be some 10 year old who thinks this is the "real" story, and crap like that is dangerous.

talemyn

Although, I think that the marketing definitely leads people to think that this is the "true story", if you dig a little deeper (i.e., read some of the details on the movie's website), it explains that this movie is meant to portray the stories/characters on which the legend of King Arthur are or may be based, as opposed to portraying the legend itself. Kind of like Disney's Hercules . . . now that was just embarassing . . .

scott shelton

Saw the film last week. What a drag!

If this film represents the "true story," I'll take the myth anyday...

Fuqua directs this like any other filmmaker who lacks imagination. And the film's timing could not be worse, coming after similar battle sequences in RETURN OF THE KING and TROY. This film comes in third.

And I feel bad for Keira Knightley fans... She's barely in this thing, yet she's the marketing icon for Disney. Fraud!

shill66

Detailed discussion on bows ... ?

I guarantee you that this thread contains more information than was researched by anyone working on the film!

kcbrett5

My point is...nobody cares!!! There might be 1 in a million people who go to see this movie who actually know about the bow technology available in the dark ages. Half of those that know won't care one way or the other. It certainly doesn't take anything away from the film that there bows are curved at the end when they shouldn't be.

Now if they start firing guns then you have a legitimate complaint. I for one didn't like Morgan Freeman inventing gunpowder in Robinhood Prince of Thieves.

But this bow discussion is extremely tedious.

Flave

This is one of my pet peeves in movies -- they go to great lengths to make impressive looking period pieces and then completely spoil the effort by insisting on using dye-blonde starlets. Once you notice this, it completely takes you out of and ruins the movie. Yeah sure, there were lots of women with blonde hair and black eyebrows in Homer's Troy. Christ, if you believe the movie, even the men (way to go Brad) dyed their hair back then.

At least Keira has dark hair! Although I'm sure there were lots of medieval English women that looked exactly like her -- yeah right. And as much as I love Keira (especially in a role that fits her), they must be effing delusional if they think I'll buy a skinny frail 19 year old girl as a warrior amazon. Christ, who are the incredible idiots who think this stuff up?

And to those of you who think that Arthur was real, here'a a bit of a write-up:

"King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table never existed in real life. They're purely figures of legend. There might have been someone called Arturus (or Riothamus) in Britain's distant past, but if there was, he was probably a Romano-British leader or military general campaigning against the marauding Saxon hordes in the 5th century AD. In that period of history, however, there was no such thing as knights-in-armour - horsemen didn't even use stirrups until much later, so they couldn't have worn and fought in armour. There are several theories about the location of the "original" court of Camelot, and although research continues, these are irrelevances: King Arthur and his knights will always be figures of fantasy, and Arthurian legend should be appreciated for what it is: a large and unique body of wonderful early European literature.

Arthur was first identified as a fictional high king from Britain's past by a monk of Welsh origin, Geoffrey of Monmouth, who chronicled 'Historia Regum Brittaniae' - "The History of the Kings of Britain" - early in the 12th Century. In a masterpiece of medieval verse he defined - in latin - the earliest coherent version of the Arthurian legend. He provides a convincing "historical" context and details King Arthur's origins and the heroic deeds of his knights, but Geoffrey's ancient sources have never been found. Nonetheless, the 'Historia' was an important cultural influence on medieval society and Geoffrey of Monmouth gave the British consciousness a heroic King to rival Charlemagne, King of the Franks. He also gave the world an extraordinary and evocative tale that has caught the imagination of creative minds through the generations."

island007

I'm hoping it is. I enjoyed Knight's Tale.

Dr. DVD

Well, like I said when I started the thread, the movie is called "King Arthur". I knew they were only using her as the "recognixable star."

scott shelton

Neg review here:

http://www.filmjerk.com/nuke/article960.html

vinhj

Didn't Joan of Arc just wave the battle standard around until she got captured? Hardly 'bashing 250 pound men.'

Dr. DVD

Me thinks that they have made the same mistake with Arthur that they made with The Alamo. When it all boils down, people prefer the popular myth as opposed to a more realistic yet unflattering approach to icons.

Stupid Disney! Eisner should get the boot after this one for sure.

shill66

And my point is that the filmmakers don't care either.