Excalibur

"The way of the necromancer," cinema by any other name, a grand pagan art. A throb of Wagner announces the style, all of John Boorman's studies and preparations for his unrealized Lord of the Rings saga are put to use in a most inspired visualization of medieval myth. Birth and death of King Arthur, his conception comes courtesy of a horny whim from Uther Pendragon (Gabriel Byrne), Merlin (Nicol Williamson) does him a solid but comes around to collect. The magic sword gleams in its mossy stone, young Arthur (Nigel Terry) claims it and turns pantheistic regent. "Rest in the arms of the dragon. Dream." Frizzy-mopped Guinevere (Cherie Lunghi) takes up with hunky Lancelot du Lac (Nicholas Clay), photographed like Eve and Adam in the Fortress of Solitude, meanwhile Morgana (Helen Mirren) bides her time and slinks from eager apprentice to avenging enchantress. Legend and its analysis simultaneously in the Lang mold (Die Nibelungen), Polanski's Macbeth is another formal crucible though Boorman's imagistic flow has its own tempo. "The one God has come to drive out the many gods," the wizard's elegy for the Dark Ages is that of an ardent filmmaker at the dawn of a sterile decade. A pearlescent glow throughout, uncanny greens plus polished plates of armor caked with blood. The Seventh Seal for the wasteland, Percival (Paul Geoffrey) trudges through it, "the last of us." (The Holy Grail comes to him as a vision while he dangles from a tree of rotting knights, then again as the music-video light following the plunge.) "Knowledge?" "And oblivion." Mordred the golden bastard (Robert Addie) lays claim to the kingdom, the crimson sun rises over the battle-scarred landscape in a dash of Kagemusha. A master class in cinematic opera concurrent with Syberberg's, "the stuff of future memory." Cinematography by Alex Thomson. With Keith Buckley, Katrine Boorman, Liam Neeson, Corin Redgrave, Niall O'Brien, Patrick Stewart, Clive Swift, Ciarán Hinds, and Charley Boorman.