King Arthur by Grace + No Comments Yet

The story of King Arthur and the Knights of his Round Table is hardly a feminist fairy tale. I mean... Lancelot, you know? And all full of male avenging and pulling swords from stones and generally phallocentricity. Antoine Fuqua's King Arthur, however, doesn't bother itself with being too true to the original tale. Whether or not this makes it a better movie is questionable, but it does up the heroine content a bit.

The heroine, of course, would be Guinevere, played by Keira Knightley, who, as I've mentioned earlier, is not my favorite. However, in this film, I mostly like her. Her first appearance, when rescued from a pagan torture chamber by Arthur and his men, is fairly typical--she does the whole "your voice came out of the darkness and you saved me!" speech, and I frankly could have lived without it. However, once she gets back on her feet, she does OK. She's good with a bow, completely fearless, and leads her own troops to battle in the film's final battle scene, dressed fairly un-sexily and painted up just like men (her troops include other women, too, which is great). She does get saved by Lancelot in the battle, but it's played in much the way one man saving another would be, so it doesn't smack of damsel-in-distress. And when the film shows her fighting, she fights--grimace on her face and blood on her hands, just like everybody else. Props for that.

The real reason I loved Guinevere, though, enough to give the otherwise OK-bordering-on-bad film three heroine content stars, is the following exchange, which takes place the first time she joins Arthur and his men as they take on a hoard of Saxons:

Lancelot: You look frightened. There's a large number of lonely men out there.
Guinevere: Don't worry, I won't let them rape you.

Not only is Guinevere undeterred by the threat (Lancelot is such an asshole, by the way), she turns it right back onto her would-be protector, implying not only that he may be the one that would be sexually attacked, but that he would need her protection. I gotta love that.

So three stars for King Arthur, not because it's good, but because it portrays a woman as an actual warrior, and one that doesn't allow physical or sexual threats to get in the way of protecting her land and her people. Might be a far cry from the original tale, but it's still good to see.

Posted by Grace in 3 Stars: Strong Contenders