There are about as many movie adaptations of the Arthurian legends as there are ice cubes in your super-sized cooldrink, and none of them seems to have got it right. I seem to remember a hackneyed romantick version wherein the villian was a weirdo named "Malagent", the aging king was played by Sean Connery, of all people, and Guinevere's adulterous affair with Lancelot was the central theme. Somehow I don't see 5th century soldiers with tiny handheld crossbows, finished in chromed steel, and wearing 15th century plate mail, if you believe. Oh, and the horses were thoroughbreds. Realistic? Hah! They may as well have worn dark glasses and rapped to medieval plainsong, like the "chorus" in Robin Hood, Men in Tights, which was supposed to be full of amusing anachronisms, like the jackhammer in the notorious bedroom scene....

Well, this version at least started out to try to be realistic, although it almost immediately tries to remodel itself into a 15th Century Romance About Love, War, King and Country, as if movie writers can't get this line of thinking beaten out of them with a big stick (just let me at 'em...) I might actually have preferred Braveheart, except that Braveheart fell into similar hackneyed themes. Gah! [They can tak' oour lives but they cannae tak' oour troousers! - er, freedom, I mean.]

What you really want in an historical version is the ability to suspend your disbelief; it's difficult to do this when Russian horsemen have Gaelic names, indigenous Celtic woad-bedecked savages have actual trebuchets, and there is an astonishing stupidity as far as weapons go. I mean, ancient Saxons with armour-piercing crossbows? In what universe? Did they travel to ancient China to go fetch them? And stirrups! Romans didn't use friggin' stirrups! They were introduced to Europe circa the Dark Ages. Even Julius Caesar, when he bothered to ride, rode with his legs hanging down, unsupported. The Romans were footsoldiers; they hired their light foaming-at-the-mouth cavalry from Gaul, although later, Julius hired only Ubii Germans from across the Rhine. There was no such thing as a "knight" in the medieval sense in ancient times; in the Roman Republic, the original knightly order, the ordo equester, became businessmen and bankers. The only ancient equivalent to a knight was a Parthian cataphract, rider and horse covered from head to foot in chain mail. They were so slow-moving, though, that a few Roman ballistae or other artillery could make fine mince from them before they ever got to the enemy. The full might of a Parthian army still couldn't take out a Roman tortoise, and generals like Lucius Lucullus and Gnaeus Pompeius both withstood massive cataphract assaults with just the mighty Roman legion at their command. (It has been said that anyone could conquer the ancient world with ten good legions.)

Ultimately, it's very difficult to separate out the various myths from the later Arthurian legends. Lancelot, for example, was a fifteenth-century addition, and Guinevere was brought in only a lttle before that. Gawain, on the other hand, is the hero of a much earlier poem called Gawain and the Green Knight, which was originally written in Old English. Knights like Sir Bors and Sir Kai fell between these two extremes. The whole grail saga was another medieval addition. Go far enough into the past, and all you have is a Romano-British general who put his troops up on black horses (probably the ancestors of modern Dartmoor ponies) and managed to check and drive back the Saxon hordes for a short time, in a brilliant campaign of seven major battles. We know little enough about where these battles were fought, but the swiftness and completeness of the victory earned "Arthur" the title Dux Brittaniorum, and there is evidence that some large Roman forts were garrisoned against further Saxon invasion for a short time. Ultimately, though, all he won was a brief breathing-space before Saxon, Angle and Jute invaders (coming from the South, dammit) settled more permanently along most of south-east Britain.

[Just for fun: The whole holy grail cycle came ultimately from ancient Celtic belief systems. The San Graal was a large cauldron, usually full of blood, gore and a floating human head. Nice. Now, no one actually knows what the whole legend was supposed to mean. The Celts were well known for sacrificing mistletoe-drugged slaves to their various deities, or drowning them in bogs. They weren't very nice people, in spite of their belief that trees had souls (especially oaks). Any nation famous for burning people alive in wicker cages isn't going to end up on my particular Christmas list. Subsequently, of course, the "Graal" was Christianised, turned into the cup Christ drank from during the Last Supper, and immortalised in bad Indiana Jones movies. Uurrgh. It also seems to have been confused with the cornucopia or horn of plenty, another ancient myth. And so, knights went searching for it, although what the actual point was, I'm not sure. I suppose it was a symbol of some intense medieval Catholic search for the unattainable ideal of perfection; the fact that more "Arthur" stories were about Lancelot and Guinevere's extra-curricular activities shows the historian what most medieval Catholics were really interested in... ]

I must say I did enjoy the movie, even if Ioan Gruffudd out-acted Clive Owen a tad; don't expect the love triangle to hang around, either - can't have human intrigues messing up the sequel, can we? Look forward to banter, sword-swinging, horses galloping, arrows flying, and general fun mayhem. But if you want something better-than-average, watch LOTR: The Two Towers again. Many more horses, many more swords, and, let's face it, Orlando Bloom and Viggo Mortensen. Liv Tyler if you're a guy. Three thumbs up, and I want the horse. He was gorgeous.

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