I loved the Knights of the Round Table as a kid, the myth and all the stories hanging off it, the sword in the stone and Merlin and Lancelot and the search for the grail, so when Excalibur came along I was really excited to see it. And it didn’t disappoint, which I can’t say about a lot of the films I’d built up that much in my head back then. Coming the year after Flash Gordon it’s almost the opposite kind of fantasy film, no winking at the camera, no camp at all, just knights in shining armour taking every word of the legend completely seriously. It’s dark and muddy and bloody in places and then suddenly beautiful, green light coming off the sword, silver armour, mist sitting on the water. I go back to it every few years and it still pulls me straight in.
What I love most is that it tries to tell the whole story in one go. Not just the bit where Arthur becomes king, or just the bit with Lancelot, but all of it, Uther and the sword, the Round Table, the betrayal, the land dying, the grail, the last battle and the sword going back into the lake. That’s a lot for one film and there are times it rushes, years flying past between scenes, boys turning into grown men while you blink. But I’d much rather have that than a film that picks one corner of the legend and leaves the rest out. Spoilers from here on, although if you know the legend you already know how this ends, and so does everyone in it.
A boy, a stone and a very strange wizard
It starts with Uther, who isn’t a good man at all, using Merlin’s magic to slip into a castle wearing another man’s face so he can take that man’s wife, and Arthur is the child that comes out of that night. So right from the start the whole story is built on a betrayal, and the film keeps circling back to that. Uther dies driving Excalibur into the stone so nobody else can have it. Years later a squire called Arthur pulls it out almost by accident, because he’s been sent to fetch a sword for his brother and that’s the one he finds. I love that scene. He doesn’t know what he’s done, the knights around him are furious, and half of them would rather kill him on the spot than kneel to a nobody.
And then there’s Merlin, who’s my favourite thing in the whole film. He’s nothing like the old man in the pointy hat and the white beard I grew up picturing, he’s twitchy and odd and a bit sad, wearing this strange metal skullcap and talking about the dragon like it’s something you can feel moving under the ground. He’s funny too, which I didn’t expect the first time, grumbling about men and their wars and how they always want one more thing. He knows how all of it ends and he helps anyway. When he says the days of his kind are numbered, that the one god is driving out the many, it lands a bit harder every time I watch it, probably because I’m older now and I get what he’s mourning.
Arthur on his knees
The moment that actually makes Arthur a king, for me, isn’t the sword in the stone at all. It’s later, at Leondegrance’s castle, when the old knight Uryens refuses to accept some boy as his king, and Arthur kneels in the river, hands him Excalibur and tells him to either knight him or kill him. Uryens has every reason to take his head off, and instead he knights him, and just like that the war’s over. It’s such a great way to show what kind of man Arthur is going to be, somebody who wins by trusting people. Which is exactly the thing that comes back to hurt him.
Leondegrance, by the way, is Patrick Stewart, which was fun to spot on a rewatch years after I’d watched him charge around in a very different kind of armour. That castle is also where Arthur first sees Guenevere, and he’s gone from the first look, the poor guy, already planning a wedding while his knights are still cleaning off their swords. Then come the good years. The Round Table, Camelot shining on a hill, everyone’s armour polished to a mirror, and Lancelot showing up out of nowhere to fight Arthur on a bridge. Arthur’s losing, and his pride makes him lean on the sword’s magic to win, and Excalibur snaps in half. The Lady of the Lake gives it back to him whole, but I always think of that as the first crack, the moment Arthur uses something sacred to win a fight he should’ve lost.
Almost Shakespeare
The love triangle is so iconic it’s almost Shakespearean, and Excalibur plays it completely straight, which is why it hurts. Lancelot is the one who escorts Guenevere to her wedding, and on the way she asks him outright, and he tells her his loyalty to the king outweighs his love for her. You can see he means it and you can see it isn’t going to last. So he stays away, he sleeps out in the forest, he fights every challenger who turns up at court, and the whole time the queen is right there across the table. Nobody in this triangle is a villain, and that’s the bit that gets me. They’re three good people who love each other, and it destroys them anyway.
When it finally breaks, it breaks in the forest. Gawain accuses the queen, Lancelot fights for her honour and wins it while badly hurt, and the two of them end up together under the trees. Arthur finds them asleep and doesn’t kill either of them, he drives Excalibur into the ground between them and walks away without it. That image has stuck with me since I was a kid, the sword standing there in the dirt between them, the king going home with nothing in his hand. It’s the part of the legend people keep retelling from every angle, and I can see why, it’s all there in that one shot. And then Morgana, Arthur’s half-sister, who’s spent the whole film quietly learning Merlin’s magic from him, traps Merlin, uses that magic to get to Arthur while he’s at his lowest, and Mordred is the result. Magic and a stolen night started all of this with Uther, and magic and a stolen night are what bring it down, the first betrayal makes Arthur and the last one makes the son who’ll kill him.
The grail, the lake and Camelot 3000
After all that the land gets sick because the king is sick, crops dying, knights going off one by one after the grail and never coming home. Perceval is the one who keeps going, a squire who wasn’t even supposed to be a knight, half-drowned and hanged and still crawling back for another try. When he finally works out the answer, that the king and the land are one, and brings the grail back to Arthur, the film turns into something else completely. Arthur rides out with what’s left of his knights, the music swells, and the trees burst into blossom as they ride past. I get chills every single time, and I’m not someone who usually gets chills.
The last battle is grim, fought under a red sky, Mordred running Arthur through with a spear and Arthur dragging himself up the shaft to finish him with Excalibur, and Perceval is left to throw Excalibur back into the lake where the hand rises up and takes it. And that’s always the moment I end up pulling my Camelot 3000 trade paperback back off the shelf. I’ve had it for years and it’s such a good story, Arthur waking up a thousand years from now with his knights reborn in new bodies, and the same old triangle playing out all over again. Excalibur ends with a king going to sleep on a boat, and I like having a story on hand where he gets back up.