Order by:

Add your comment

Do you want to let us know what you think? Just login, after which you will be redirected back here and you can leave your comments.

Comments 1 - 8 of 8

Siskoid's avatar

Siskoid

When I came out of The Green Knight, my brain was on fire and I truly felt I could write 40 essays about this film (having just re-read the original poem no added added a few essays to the pile, and gave me the right context to appreciate the alliterative verse they actually use on screen - I'm a man of simple tastes, all I wanted from the movie was alliterative verse). When the poem was in illustration of chivalric values, the film is perhaps more a deconstruction of them, and its Gawain (brilliantly played by Dev Patel) is a man-child with fewer virtues than the text's would admit. There, it was about overcoming his crucial flaw, cowardice, but in the film, he understands honor as a word in a book, apprehending it like a child would. So no matter how much he travels, his quest is an interior one (and his ultimate heroic act an interior one). I've read a quick review of the poem that went "English literature's first WTF", and I quite like that. It's full of surprise twists. The film makes changes to better foreground those surprises, give them more meaning, keep a certain ambiguity, and so on, with injections of other Gawain tales (or tellings) that keep even the literary nerd off-balance, yet add to the whole. Great imagery supports the theme of substitution that is present in the original romance, and despite the supernatural elements, Camelot looks like the Dark Ages, not Hollywood's colorful version of it. I'm just scratching the surface of a very deep ocean here.
2 years 8 months ago
Boei's avatar

Boei

Wonderful! Amazing cinematography (Almost every single every shot is stunning), strange but interesting story and great atmosphere. Did not understand everything, but that's the idea. Eager to read the book now.
2 years 8 months ago
gobberpooper's avatar

gobberpooper

Very odd movie that gives you a lot to think about. I went with people who have and haven't read the original stories and poems so we all had a different experience and different hindsight analysis. To give you an idea, we ended up staying in the parking lot for over an hour in the hot sun discussing it.

I'm not sure if I liked it or not, but I don't think this is a movie that should even be judged by whether or not you liked watching it, that's not really the point.

I will say I rather disliked the editing. If you see it you'll understand what I mean, but the timing of the cuts and what shots it cuts between as well as the fade transitions make the whole movie feel like one long trailer. I can't tell if it's on purpose so you never settle in (and thus gives the movie the feel of a "and then THIS happened" style that old stories have), or if it was just edited sloppily.
2 years 8 months ago
dulaman's avatar

dulaman

fyi there's a short scene after the credits like a marvel movie
2 years 8 months ago
ireni's avatar

ireni

Oniric in a sense, beautiful in a sense, shows about the doubts of the human mind in a re-visited Arthurian tale. Dont try to understand, just experience.
2 years ago
soraxtm's avatar

soraxtm

God this film felt like it was six hours long and in the end nothing means anything. Actually that sounds like the perfect existential type film but given the pedestrian writing and the meaningless cold artificial sets you are left with nothing interesting for your mind to ponder on as it tediously grinds out its plot. Slow Slow Slow and I loved Satantango.
2 years 6 months ago
boulderman's avatar

boulderman

Felt too little, too light to me 5/10
2 years 6 months ago
chunkylefunga's avatar

chunkylefunga

For anyone who is well versed in Gawain Poet's Sir Gawain and the Green Knight this movie will infuriate you.

If absolutely butchers the beauty and deep moral quandary of said poem and turns it into a pile of pretentious Hollywood nonsense.

There is absolutely no way that anyone who is learned in Arthurian lore or 14th-century Middle English poetry will find this anything but utter tosh.

How anyone can read the source material and materialise such nonsense is beyond me.
2 years 8 months ago
View comments