Same ideas
Tears of the Sun did have a broadly similar set up to King Arthur. A small bunch of soldiers send on a mission into bandit country to extract someone. They get too involved and heroically help out the locals ( like The Magnificent Seven). Oh yeah, and the bandits are intent on ethnic cleansing. The last concept is entirely appropriate for the modern story that is Tears, but I would take issue in sloppily translating it to 5th century Britain.
posted by Alex Bordessa @ Monday, May 08, 2006
5 Comments:
Interesting. I'd assumed the expedition north of the Wall bit in King Arthur had come from David Franzoni's "Arthurian mythos as western" concept, but if Fuqua was drawing on his own previous work it explains how the film departs from Franzoni's specific "Knights of Camelot as the Wild Bunch" notion.
Thanks for visiting :-) I just found the whole KA film disappointing; there are so many good novels to draw from and they ignored them.
Yes. I know I get agitated about the lack of historicity in King Arthur, but if you don't worry about that it's still an absurd film.
I watched a wonderful Hollywood film the other day The Bad & the Beautiful and the writing was top of the range - witty, subtle, in full command, great storytelling. KA is resoundingly at the bottom of the range, with little finesse and no idea of the difference between fantasy and history. Given that anything to do with King Arthur is very difficult to classify (whether fiction OR non-fiction) there was still a much better story to tell. I don't mind Excalibur for example as it's good, intriguing, story telling.
I quite like Excalibur (Nicol Williamson's OTT performance aside), as it doesn't try to be any more than a retelling of the mythology. (I still prefer Holy Grail, though.)
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