Excalibur (film): Difference between revisions

* [[Bittersweet Ending]]: {{spoiler|almost every major character is dead by the end of the movie.}} But {{spoiler|the Land has been replenished, and England (and the world) has a Legend built on the heroics of King Arthur and his knights.}}

* [[Breast Plate]]: Morgana's armor, which looks like a sheet-iron corset ''with nothing under it''.

* [[Cherry Blossoms]]

* [[The Chosen One]]: Arthur

* [[Fisher King]]: Arthur

* [[Friend to All Living Things]]: Merlin, in a creepy kind of way -- crows tend to show up when he's near.

* [[Hidden Depths]]: Perceval

* [[Interplay of Sex and Violence]]: Truces and friendships are broken, wars and plagues are started because of sex. {{spoiler|The slow death of the Duke of Cornwall, [[Impaled With Extreme Prejudice|impaled on a row of spears]], interspersed with the scene of Uther, disguised as Cornwall, having sex with Igraine, is quite iconic.}}

* [[Knight in Shining Armor]]: Averted at the beginning of the movie, where the armors are more dark and matte than shiny, then played straight after the first encounter with Lancelot, but they do get rusty later.

** Another facet of the [[Fisher King]] aspect. The better Arthur's doing, the shinier the armor.

** But there's no bigger ham than Merlin.

* [[Loads and Loads of Characters]]: Now with its own [[Comicbook/Excalibur/The Film/Characters|Character Sheet]].

* [[Offscreen Teleportation]]: Merlin -- [[Justified Trope|justified]], given his nature, and also subverted in a scene where we see him walking toward the camera, from a distant background, while other characters talk in the foreground, having not noticed him. He reaches them just as one of them asks "And who is Merlin?"; he also does ''onscreen'' teleportations.

* [[Ominous Latin Chanting]]: ''O Fortuna''

* [[Popcultural Osmosis]]: ''Excalibur'' is to ''O Fortuna'' what ''[[2001: A Space Odyssey]]'' is to ''Thus Spoke Zarustrutha''.

* [[Public Domain Artifact]]: Excalibur and the Holy Grail, obviously.

{{quote| "It is everywhere. It is everything. Its scales glisten in the bark of trees. Its roar is heard in the wind. And its forked tongue strikes like... *lightning strikes* like lightning... yes, that's it!"}}

* [[Tragic Hero]]: Lancelot.

* [[Unstoppable Rage]]: Arthur when he first fights Lancelot.

* [[Visible Invisibility]]: Merlin

* [[What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic]]: The movie is ''chock-full'' of symbols referring to Celtic paganism and Christian mysticism.

 

{{reflist}}