MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical* Director Marco Van Belle's ARTHUR AND MERLIN looks like what John Boorman might have produced, had he been forced to make EXCALIBUR on MERLIN's budget. The Boorman comparison also applies in that Van Belle also sought to approach the familiar tropes of Arthurian myth in an idiosyncratic manner. However, Van Belle and his collaborators weren't even close to having organized their idiosyncrasies into a pleasing whole.
One big change is that Merlin and Arthur (who are given archaic Celtic names that I'm not going to type here) are roughly the same age. We first see both of them as kids, fifteen years before the story proper. Merlin is a child born with a caul, and his mother tells him that this is a mark of favor from the ancient (never seen) race of the Tuadann. (This is patently a derivation from the Celtic faerie-folk sometimes called "the Tuatha de Danaan.") Young Merlin's mother tells him that the Tuadann still exist and intervene in a never-ending war between "good pagan gods" and "bad pagan gods." As if to confirm the ongoing conflict, the druid Aberthol (Nigel Cooke) shows up on the doorstep of Merlin's tribe, demanding to sacrifice one of the tribesmen, and selecting Young Merlin for the honor. Since Aberthol is backed by the authority of King Vortigern, no one can stop the execution. However, Young Arthur, a minor byblow of a royal family, has come along with Aberthol's retinue, and Young Arthur makes possible Young Merlin's escape. The future wizard disappears into a haunted forest where no one will follow him.
Fifteen years later, Arthur (Kirk Barker) is a twentysomething warrior in the service of Vortigern. The monarch has become addled with age and is still under the control of Evil Aberthol. Arthur becomes convinced that the druid is truly allied to the invading Saxons, and that he plots to get as many Celts killed as possible. When Aberthol gets the king to exile Arthur-- and even to turn against Vortigern's own ward Olwen (Arthur's secret lady love) -- Arthur decides that he needs magical help. He delves into the forbidden forest and eventually finds the adult Merlin (Stefan Butler) -- though the wizard has become a bit addled himself, as he's been given invisible tutelage in the magical arts by those never-seen Tuadann. Long story short, Arthur finally manages to convince the sorcerer to leave his comfort zone and join the fight against Aberthol.
The joined heroes make one important discovery: Aberthol isn't working for the Saxons. Rather, he wants to kill as many people as possible in order to summon forth one of the dark gods-- though it's not clear if the druid does so for personal gain or for religious obsessions. This plotline resembles Robert E Howard more than Thomas Malory, but that's less a problem than Van Belle's inability to come up with compelling melodrama. ARTHUR AND MERLIN is not an awful movie. But Van Belle, who basically had only done shorts before this film, simply creates too many dead-end plot-threads. Here's one interesting "dropped thread": Arthur nobly rescues a Saxon woman from rape by Arthur's own Celtic kinsmen. The thugs fling her Christian cross into a nearby pond, but before they can do anything else, Arthur arrives and chases off the malcontents. The woman asks the hero to retrieve her cross from the pond. Arthur does so, and in taking that action, he finds a magical sword-- albeit one never called Excalibur. The sword does show the future king visions, though, and those visions lead him to Merlin, making it possible for the duo to defeat the evil druid. This was an odd confluence of Christian and pagan elements, but it might have given rise to good mythicity in the hands of a better storyteller. But most of the movie is mediocre, ending with only the suggestion of how the muddled mystic will lead the reluctant youth to his kingly destiny.
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