Oh, how true that is. I cannot watch historical dramas without getting upset at the anachronisms. I have no trouble with cheesy Hercules Unchained rubbish but something that purports to convey truth and does not, causes the veins in my temple to throb. Herewith the three worst “historical” films. Number Three on your program is Oliver Stone’s JFK. Stone took the paranoid fantasies of New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison and turned it into an attack on the military-industrial complex. The fact that Garrison’s theories were laughed out of court mattered naught to Stone. Number Two is The Burning Times by Canada’s National Film Board under the direction of Starhawk, a witch. It claims that there was a Female Holocaust of 9,000,000 dead in the early-modern witchcraft craze. This was happily used by university Women’s Studies departments for years.
Number One, the worst historical film ever made, is King Arthur directed by Antoine Fuqua.
The lies start with the voiceover introduction: “By 300 AD, the Roman Empire extended from Arabia to Britain. But they wanted more. More land. More peoples loyal and subservient to Rome. But no people so important as the powerful Sarmatians to the east. Thousands died on that field. And when the smoke cleared on the fourth day, the only Sarmatian soldiers left alive were members of the decimated but legendary cavalry. The Romans, impressed by their bravery and horsemanship, spared their lives. In exchange, these warriors were incorporated into the Roman military. Better they had died that day.”
Rubbish in the first degree. By 300 the Roman empire was not expanding; it was barely holding on, rescued from collapse by soldier-emperor Diocletian who persecuted Christians intensely and who did not put Christian symbols on his soldiers’ shields as the opening scenes suggested.
“The powerful Sarmatians” were not all that powerful and were just about on their last legs as an independent people in the 300s AD; they certainly weren’t conquered by the Romans (they were absorbed by Slavs and other barbarian confederacies) or enlisted by the Romans as “knights”, an anachronistic term.
The film is set in Britain in the year 476 with Arthur (Clive Owen) leading a troop of Sarmatian cavalry in the Roman army. In fact, the last Roman military unit left the island in 410. And they ride with stirrups which were unknown at the time.
Arthur is a follower of Pelagius (a real historical character, a British heretic who proposed a theory of human free will at odds with the Christian doctrine of the need for divine grace). In the movie Pelagius’s notion of free will is meant to be some sort of democracy and he is murdered by the Church because of it. In fact Pelagius died c 420 unmolested by the Church, except in debate.
Pelagius’s murderer is the film’s villain, Bishop Germanius (clearly supposed to be Germanus of Auxerre, the opponent of Pelagius who died in 429 and who, of course, never laid a finger on the heretic much less killed him.) He reneges on the deal that would have allowed Arthur’s men to go home, forcing them to go on one last mission, to rescue a Roman official who lives north of Hadrian’s Wall and whose son might be the pope one day.
The Christian official whom the heroes are sent to save is, of course, a very bad man who tortures his slaves for asking for food. He tells them he speaks with the voice of God and that it is a sin to disobey him. The willingness of the film to tar the Church with any sort of evil reaches its low point when we see a monk wall himself up with pagans, eager to torture them into salvation and starve to death in the process. “It is God’s wish that these sinners be sacrificed. Only then can their souls be saved.”
All of this anti-Christian blather goes on before the battles with the invading Saxons who are shown to be racists as well as real mean guys (and invading north of the Wall instead of hundreds of miles south of it as in real life. There was nothing to steal up north.) Arthur teams up with British natives known as “Woads”, in real life the “Picts”. Woad is the plant that gives the blue dye the Picts adorned themselves with. Such an alliance is necessary because we learn that the Saxons have metal crossbows (not invented until 800 years later) but the Woads have trebuchets (likewise centuries out of place.) The most attractive of the Woads is Guinevere (Keira Knightley) who hurls her fragile frame clad in a well-tailored deer-skin bikini against the Saxons in a series of dazzling kung-fu moves unknown to history until the birth of Jet Li.
Sorry for the rant. It’s been 16 years since King Arthur and I’m still mad.