Excalibur: The Movie The West Needs Now

“My pride broke it!  My rage broke it!  This excellent knight, who fought with fairness and grace, was meant to win.  I used Excalibur to change that verdict.  I’ve lost, for all time, the ancient sword of my fathers, whose power was meant to unite all men, not to serve the vanity of a single man.  I am . . . nothing.” – Excalibur

I tried to pull the sword from the stone, but I wasn’t Arthurized.

I rewatched Excalibur last weekend for the first time, likely, since Reagan was president and the phrase “press one for English” had yet to be spoken.

It was glorious, and better than I remembered, and that isn’t just the wine talking.  Excalibur came out in 1981, directed by John Boorman, who also brought us the underrated epic of Zardoz.  Any man who can talk Sean Connery into wearing an orange diaper for an entire film and likes guns as much as Boorman is okay.

Excalibur, however, features no orange underwear or guns.  It is, however, one of the most nationalistic, unapologetic, mythic, sword-swinging spectacles ever put on film.

To be clear:  it’s not a history lesson.  It’s a legend.

First things first:  no, the armor isn’t remotely historically accurate.  Plate armor like that didn’t show up until centuries after the real  Arthur would have been stomping around Britain in the 600s or 700s.  The knights look like they stepped out of a 15th-century tournament sponsored by the Stainless Steel Institute® instead of a muddy Dark Ages battlefield.

The wedding party lasted too late into the night for one of Arthur’s Knights.  Poor Sir Cadian.

Boorman knew this.  He didn’t care because Excalibur isn’t trying to be a documentary.  It’s a full-throated retelling of the King Arthur myth, the kind that’s been passed around campfires and tavern tables for more than a thousand years.  When I looked back at the overall King Arthur Literary Universe©, I found that there were endless characters and sub-characters and plots and mutually exclusive elements.

Boorman picked the main plot points of the Arthur myth perfectly.  As a result, the film knows exactly what it is:  a legend soaked in Christianity, fog, blood, magic, virtue, redemption, and destiny.

The critics, when it first came out, whined that the characters weren’t “complex” enough.  Arthur wasn’t nuanced.  Guinevere wasn’t layered and didn’t have a chance to prove herself on the battlefield as a Strong Independent Woman©.  Lancelot wasn’t a tortured anti-hero with a tragic backstory and three therapy sessions.

That’s the damn point.

They’re archetypes.

My favorite dessert at Thanksgiving is made by dividing a pumpkin’s circumference by its diameter:  pumpkin pi.

Arthur is the Once and Future King.  He is pure, flawed, larger than life and his failings are the point of the movie.  Merlin is the scheming wizard who sees the long game.  Morgana is ambition and vengeance and hotness wrapped in snakes, silk, and spite.  The film doesn’t waste time giving everyone a five-minute monologue about their feelings.

It trusts the myth to simply be what it is.

And with the exception of Helen Mirren, all of the rest of the cast in main roles flailed for the rest of their careers as B and C listers.  But in this movie?  Nigel Terry is Arthur.  Nicol Williamson is a Merlin that is so Merlin that I can’t imagine another person being Merlin.  In what probably saved their careers, you’ll spot Liam Neeson, Gabriel Byrne, and Patrick Stewart in roles that are nearly so brief you’ll blink and miss them.

The actors are the roles they were born to play, and the story moves like a river in flood.  That’s why it still works.

Part of the backstory is that Boorman wanted to make a Lord of the Rings movie, but thankfully couldn’t find anyone stupid enough to take the risk on a production far too large for its time.  Instead, he made Excalibur.

I imagine Father’s Day was uncomfortable around the castle.

Excalibur is a nationalist British film, made by a British director, for an audience that still remembered what a legend actually was.  Men were men.  Women were women.

Honor and virtue mattered.  Betrayal hurt.  Sex was raw and consequential, not a punchline or a sermon.  People with good motives weren’t ridiculed.

Boorman put his own flesh and blood into the movie, literally.  Boorman had to direct his own young and incredibly hot daughter in one of the more, shall we say, vigorous scenes in the movie.

Yeah.

Imagine Boorman as a director, talking to his daughter:  “Honey, can you just, you know, a little more passion on take three?  Hip thrusts, dear.”  To top it off, Boorman’s son played the young version of Mordred.  This is the family business, Boorman style.

The man didn’t just make a movie about myth, he co-wrote the screenplay, directed the film, produced the film, and he dragged his own bloodline into the forge.  No wonder the whole movie feels more alive than most things that have been made in the last decade.

That is why Excalibur feels dangerous somehow next to today’s polished, focus-grouped slop.

No one was trying to make Excalibur “relatable for modern audiences.”  No one was worried about alienating the overseas market or triggering the comment section.  No soulless Disney© corporate executive (but I repeat myself at least three times) was trying to make a tentpole for the Arthur Cinematic Universe© and have three more movies so they could triple the profits.

He just told the damn story.

You know I’m right.

The result is a film that looks like it was shot inside a stained-glass window:  every frame drips with atmosphere, every line of dialogue sounds like it was read off of a stone carving.  The classical music fills the spots perfectly.  The (very inaccurate) battles feel like they matter because the people swinging the swords believe in something bigger than themselves.

The movie is earnest.  The actors and writers and crew believe in the story they’re telling.

That’s the contrast that stings in 2026.  We’re drowning in corporate product:  remakes, reboots, and “elevated” retellings that strip out everything that made the originals mythic.

They give us complexity instead of clarity, messaging instead of meaning.

Excalibur reminds me why the old stories endured:  they weren’t about making transgender people or minorities feel seen.  They were about making people feel the weight of destiny, the cost of power, and the pull of something ancient and also something that was True, Beautiful, and Good.

Search for “Amelia Meme UK”.

So, if you haven’t seen it, you might correctly guess I’m a fan.  If you haven’t seen it in a while, give it another shot.  Pour something that Arthur would have quaffed, turn the lights down, put the damn phones up, and let the sword rise from the lake one more time.

In a world that’s forgotten how to tell legends, Excalibur still knows exactly what it is.  And just like King Arthur himself, there will never be another like it.

Let’s hope that Great Britain remembers Arthur’s words from the film:  “Now, once more, I must ride with my knights to defend what was, and the dream of what could be.”

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

42 thoughts on “Excalibur: The Movie The West Needs Now”

  1. I love that scene where they ride out for one last time and how about that Percival finding the meaning of the grail.
    Merlin steals the show, the Wizard!

    1. Same here. There are SO many good scenes in the film but the apple blossom scene (ride out for the last time) to the music of Oh Fortuna is magnificent.

      1. Klaus-

        In my comment below didn’t know if sweetie had seen it. She had and said the apple blossom scene was fabulous. And had 2 children by 1981. So, I’ve no excuse.

        As we live over half of the time in Beaufort, SC, looking forward to watching “The Big Chill” to see downtown (Bay St.) from 1983. A friend is coming over to set up the smart TV. The Great Santini, Forrest Gump & GI Jane didn’t show downtown; it’s a country mini-Charleston. No 5-Star Hotels; they have 6 on The Peninsula.

  2. 1981? We rarely did movies. Too busy raising a 4 yr. old daughter and running my father-in-law’s business. But finally bought a smart TV last month, so I’ll check it out. (Once we figure out how to operate it.) Don’t know if sweetie would be interested, despite having an MA In English. And an MBA/JD, cum laude.

    Question – Do the Knights Of Nee appear and demand shrubbery from Arthur?

  3. Does the scene of tge knights in the springtime of their virtu riding out to the music of carmina burana still hit? I bet it does.

    Also: minor tweak wanted to my favorite dad joke on the piece: “party lasted was too late into the night”. Pick one 😄

    1. I always get chills watching that scene. I love Carl Orff’s opera Carmina Burana and especially the selection Oh, Fortuna. This version of Excalibur is my very favorite of all the versions made, and in my top ten movies.

  4. I didn’t get to see this until PreView/OnTV in 1982 (had to wait nearly a year after the theatrical release then) but even at home it was magnificent storytelling. I need to revisit it sometime.

  5. Great movie. Imho a bit too late for the Brits. We Have nothing but antiheroes and victim mentality now.

    1. It’s never too late until you decide to give up and stop trying.
      To quote from a not-unrelated story:

      “Arise now, arise, Riders of Théoden!
      Dire deeds awake: dark is it eastward.
      Let horse be bridled, horn be sounded!
      Forth Eorlingas!

      Arise, arise, Riders of Théoden!
      Fell deeds awake: fire and slaughter!
      Spear shall be shaken, shield be splintered,
      a sword-day, a red day, ere the sun rises!
      Ride now, ride now! Ride to Gondor!”

        1. 100,000 British girls were raped by invaders, with not a single gun in sight.
          It’s not the lack of tools that’s holding back the British people. It’s a lack of intestinal resolve, plus the fecklessness of their leaders. We have the exact same problem here on our side of the pond.

  6. One of my favorite films along with “Zardoz”. I have both on dvd.

  7. Strange tale about the sword in the movie. It closely resembles a Scottish family sword that dates back to 1072. A recreation of that sword was made by Albion. The story is here:
    https://web.archive.org/web/20060717114312/http://www.albion-swords.com/Discerner/Discerner.html

    “A friend of mine invites me to go with him to see a new movie called “Excalibur”. I go and almost fall out in a dead faint when the sword comes up out of the water and then Uther draws the sword in that beginning truce scene. I actually had to get up and leave out of the theater for some fresh air (I think it was the closest I’d ever come to fainting in my life because it felt like I was sliding backward through a tube that was getting darker and darker). My friend came out to see if I was alright and found me sort of trembling and hyperventilating a little. He actually emptied his popcorn bag and told me to breathe in and out of it until I calmed down … afterwhich, I told him what’d made me have such a reaction … there on that big screen was the very image of my family sword down to the last detail. Naturally, he laughed and scoffed a little, but not too much. As we went back into the theater I told him to take special notice of every detail of the sword because I had something I wanted to show him when we got back to my trailer house. So we spent the whole movie scrutinizing the sword every time it would appear in a scene. When we got back to the trailer, I pulled out Discerner’s tracing and showed it to him … and watched the color drain from his face as he remarked that it was astounding. Literally, as far as we could see, it was the same sword design. His mind teemed with wild ideas about it while my mind teemed with the idea that someone sooner or later would make a replica of the sword which I could buy and hang on my wall to represent Discerner.”

  8. I saw “Excalibur” in the theater when it came out, and I’ve watched it many times since then. A couple of years ago, I re-read “The Once and Future King” and “The Book of Merlin” and inevitably read Merlin’s words in Nicol Williamson’s voice.

  9. A fun movie. I saw it in my high school British Humanities class (a combined two-period junior year English literature and English history course).

      1. “Difficult question.” There are somewhere north of a thousand varients of Fate/ right now. The very, very, very original tried to cover too much at once, as the idea came from a 3-branch visual novel. I can solidly recommend Fate/Zero, but don’t have any children in the house when you watch it. Unlimited Blade Works is a cleaned up, more recent version, so you should probably start with that.

        Full Disclosure: all writers steal from one another and there are several element in my books from the Fate universe.

  12. Excalibur came out when I was pretty young and my older sisters took me to see it because of course I share a name with the King in question. The scene where Arthur is conceived…..one of those formative moments for a young lad. It remains one of the finest films ever made in my less-than-humble opinion.

  14. Boorman’s daughter needed coaching? She was probably thinking to herself “How do I play this scene without looking like I’ve played it a hundred times before, without Dad and the cameras present?”

  15. I remember seeing it in high school with some friends but none in our group really liked it. I think we had just seen Monty Python’s version a few months earlier and it just resonated more with our teenage brains (along with boobies and Led Zeppelin). I will have to go back and watch it again though since my tastes have changed a lot over the years (change with regards to movies, not the other stuff).

    I didn’t realize Boorman made that movie but I actually did like Zardoz, having seen it on Mystery Science Theater of all places. Yeah, it was a bit cheesy at times, but it was a truly unique story that really left an impression.

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