Hic iacet Bruckheimer, productor quondam productorque futurus

So I watched the 2004 movie King Arthur last night in preparation for my course, and I confess I liked it more than I thought I would. I've been wanting a gritty, non-magical treatment of a Roman-Empire Arthur for a long time, and the movie scratched that itch, but boy, could it ever have been better written. And please pardon my pedantry, but if you're going to insist that this is the "true story" of the historical Arthur, remove him from Wales to Hadrian's Wall, etc., you'd better make it a damned historically accurate movie. Crossbows in the fifth century? Chain-mail? Why insist on having a character called Merlin if you're ditching the myth? Why include Lancelot and Guenever if you're trying to get to a true story unsullied by late medieval French interpolations? The fifth century didn't see marauding armies of Picti sailing over the wall (nor, I believe, did anyone call them "woads"); the Saxons landed in Kent and East Anglia, not Scotland. Why does the Roman longsword (yeah, I know) "Excalibur" have Saxon runes inscribed on it? Are "Tristan" and "Gawain" really meant to be Salmatian names?

That said, the battle sequences and fight choreography are pretty brilliant, and Arthur's knights--Salmatian mercenary cavalry--are charmingly like a dark-age biker gang: Bors head-butts a guy and claims to be from hell; all he needs is some Skynyrd and a hog. And any movie that lets Keira Knightley kick Saxon ass in a costume made of leather straps and blue paint has to earn at least three stars.