Movie Review: The Green Knight (R – 130 minutes)

 

Do you remember having to read about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in your high school English Literature class? Vaguely? It seems like the makers of this film also vaguely remember the original story.

Be sure to check out the LAMBCast episode on the Green Knight to hear myself and several other LAMBs attempt to better our understanding of this film:  https://www.podomatic.com/podcasts/lambcast/episodes/2021-08-02T13_29_30-07_00

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a 14^th century poem written in alliterative verse that uses various symbols and allegories to highlight the code of chivalry, what it means to be a knight, and passing challenges to prove one’s worthiness.  This movie skips several of those themes. The poem tells the tale of Gawain, King Arthur’s nephew, during a celebration, the Green Knight shows up and issues a challenge to the court: one of the knights can land a blow on him, but then one year from then, the Green Knight gets to return the blow.  Gawain accepts the challenge and cuts off the knight’s head, thinking he has beaten the game. However, the knight picks up his head, reminds Gawain of the year-challenge and takes off.  Gawain then sets off on a journey, encountering many challenges that help prove he is ready to be a knight of the round table.

This movie starts out the same with the challenge and beheading but adds scenes to show that Gawain is basically a lazy drunk, spending his nights in a brothel. His mother seems to cast a spell that conjures the Green Knight.  Gawain attempts to drink away the year, but Arthur shows up and reminds him that he must seek out the knight and finish the challenge.  Along the way, he encounters a thief, mushrooms, a fox, giants (that either speak fox, or the fox speaks giant), a ghost, and a couple in a hunting lodge.  You expect him to grow with each of these various aspects of his journey, showing that he is worthy of becoming of knight (which is the point of the poem). However, he barely survives most of the encounters, and certainly does not seem to improve as a person. When he finally re-encounters the Green Knight, he gets a vision of what his life would be if he runs away from the challenge and so he recommits to allowing the Knight his hit, at which point we get an abrupt end.

It feels like writer/director David Lowery wanted to create an epic fantasy movie based on this classic work. In my opinion, he falls short.  The movie looks amazing, the sets are stunning, the locations are beautiful, and the costumes are breathtaking. The characters and story are where I think it is lacking. 

Dev Patel is usually a capable lead, but here, he is flat and uninteresting.  The movie seems to want to be about his journey towards knighthood, but none of the challenges he encounters allow him to grow, become wise, or even adapt.  He ends the movie basically as annoying as he was at the beginning and it is hinted that he is now changed, but the movie ends before we see any proof of that evolution.

Sean Harris plays the creepiest version of King Arthur you have ever seen, realizing he is at the end of his life and regretting not getting to know his nephew earlier.  Kate Dickie plays Gwenivere, also very creepy and sickly. 

Sarita Choudhury plays Gawain’s mother, Arthur’s sister. In legend, she is Morgan le Fay, here she casts weird spells in a tower and creates a belt or sash that will protect Gawain that he promptly loses and then finds again.

Erin Kellyman plays a mysterious lady Gawain meets in a cabin who is dead and requests that he retrieve her head from the nearby pond.  It seems like he should learn a lesson from that encounter as well, but I could not begin to tell you what it was. He does at first ask what he will get in return if he gets her head, and she chastises him for that, so perhaps that good deeds are their own reward? Yes, that sounds good.

Joel Edgerton (who played Gawain in the Fuqua King Arthur) and Alicia Vikander play the lord and lady of the hunting lodge.  In nearly all other versions, the lord is also the Green Knight, but that is never mentioned here.  They enter into some very strange bargains involving favors, trades, hunting and kisses.

Overall, the movie looks hauntingly beautiful and is sweepingly gorgeous on the big screen. However, the story does not match the visuals and that left me disappointed. This version Gawain is very hard to root for because he feels charmless and unaffected. It is unclear if he learned any of the lessons of his journey, but then – it is very hard to tell what any of those lessons were.  I wanted to this feel like the Odyssey, where the point of the story is the journey, not the destination. However, both the journey and destination were so murky in this movie, neither felt like the point.  Oh well, at least the giants looked cool and the fox made it through unharmed.  

4 out of 10

Movie Review: Snake Eyes: G.I. Joe Origins (PG13 – 121 minutes)

Now that the Olympics are over, I can catch up on some of the other things I have been neglecting – first thing – a delayed review of Snake Eyes! When I first heard they were making this movie, I thought maybe they would let Ray Park get to play the character again.  That is once again not the case as he gets recast yet again. I am certainly not complaining, Henry Golding is wonderful.

I have zero knowledge of the original G.I.Joe toys or cartoons. I know they are by Hasbro, and that they were very popular in the 80s – and I know that knowing is half the battle. I certainly did see the two G.I.Joe movies, the first with Channing Tatum and the second with the Rock. Snake Eyes in those is basically a silent ninja all in black with a grudge against a ninja all in white on the bad guys’ team. 

This movie gives you Snake Eyes origin story. What’s that? You weren’t asking for his backstory? No worries, the majority of this movie plays like a really cool Yakuza martial arts thriller, and those are the parts I liked the most. We meet Snake Eyes as a child living with his dad in a very remote cabin.  We soon learn that his dad is in witness protection as a group of bad guys shows up and eliminates him. The killer has his dad roll dice to determine his fate and of course they come up snake eyes, and the child takes that name going forward.

We catch up with him as he is cage fighting for money. A yakuza boss shows up and offers him a job because he knows all about Snake (he really couldn’t find another name to use?) and his quest for his father’s killer. We then jump slightly forward to see that Snake is working for the boss and befriended another employee, Tommy.  Then, in a slightly confusing sequence – we learn that Tommy was actually undercover in the organization to keep an eye on the boss who had betrayed his family years ago. Snake saves him, and together they go on the run. Tommy takes Snake back to his family, where he undergoes three challenges to become a ninja of the highest order. 

That part of the movie is great, super interesting, fantastic action, and fantastic and engaging performances by Golding and Andrew Koji as Tommy.  It’s about at this point where the G.I.Joe bits come in: Snake learns Cobra (the bad guys) was actually behind the killing of his father because his father was a Joe, Tommy’s family has a magic weapon stone that they protect but are sworn not to use, and Cobra is after the stone, big time as they launch an attack on Tommy’s family’s compound – oh, and there’s a pit with giant snakes. It all gets to be a bit convoluted but stays entertaining.

Director Robert Schwentke does a great job with both halves of the movie, but they do feel a little like two separate things. I really enjoyed the first half but spent a lot of the second half rolling my eyes.  Golding and Koji are great, with Koji being even more interesting than Golding. It is pretty obvious from early on where his character is going, and I might be interested to see more from him.

Haruka Abe plays Akiko, Tommy’s head of security who goes from distrustful of Snake to suddenly in love with him? A little confusing there, but she did what she could. The standouts are, of course, Ido Uwais and Peter Mensah as the two masters on staff at Tommy’s compound who walk Snake through his challenges. They are both wonderful, action-packed, and bring a light fun touch that most of the rest of the movie was missing. Everyone else was working hard, these two were having a good time while working hard.

Ursula Corbero plays the Baroness and Samara Weaving plays Scarlett, the opposing sides of the same coin that feels forced into the story.

This movie is clearly setting up additional G.I.Joe movies which I found interesting, because it does not seem to be an IP that is having any kind of resurgence – the cartoon hasn’t stayed on, it hasn’t been rebooted (as far as I know), so the fan base is basically those who loved it in the 80s and want to see more. That can be a little tough to get the tone of the movies correct. It seems like this movie did that, but I would be curious to know what die hard Joe fans thought and if they even want more live-action movies.  Personally, I would have been happy if this was just an organized crime martial arts thriller – which it almost is, so I was almost happy.

6 out of 10