First Knight Should Get Last Rites
First Knight
Cast: Sean Connery, Richard Gere, Julia Ormond
Director: Jerry Zucker
Movie Help Web Popcorn Kernels: 
Run away! Run away!
OK, so maybe First Knight isn't quite that bad. It does make a valiant effort at looking and sounding like the legend of King Arthur. But this version of Camelot is as plausible as Monty Python's — and should be taken as seriously.
The premise: England is about to get a new queen, Lady Guinevere (Ormond), who is to marry King Arthur (Connery). On the way to her wedding, she's waylaid by the evil Malagant (Ben Cross), then rescued by Lancelot (Gere). He falls in love with her — and she with him — but he delivers her to the King anyway, and then decides to stick around and join his Round Table.
My major complaint with First Knight? It ignores everything that makes the Arthurian legend, well, legendary. The script tosses out Merlin, Morgan le Fay, Mordred, Excalibur, the quest for the Holy Grail, and everything else so it can focus on the love affair between Guinevere and Lancelot. Plus, it makes Arthur and Lancelot much, much older than they should be; instead of a young king brimming with hope and life, we get an elder statesman who, one senses, is ready to be pushed off his throne.
Why does this matter? Because it's billed as an Arthurian romance — and it's not. You could change Arthur, Lancelot and Guinevere to Tom, Dick and Harriet, and it wouldn't make a bit of difference to the plot. The movie simply borrowed the names from the legend and used nothing else.
The affair itself, the whole point of First Knight, isn't even scripted that well. Picture Guinevere with a flower, plucking petals and saying, "I love Arthur, I love him not, I love Lancelot, I love him not..." That's about as deep as it gets.
It doesn't help that Gere is completely unconvincing as Lancelot. He seems to smirk his way through most roles, and this one is no exception. Connery does the best he can with Arthur, though he's saddled with ponderous lines like "For the first in my life, I wanted what all wise man say can't last; what can't be promised or made to linger any more than sunlight." Ormond, who seems to have carved out a niche as the-woman-whom-more-than-one-man-falls-in-love-with (see, or rather don't see, Legends of the Fall and the remake of Sabrina) is merely adequate as Guinevere.
I can't talk too much about the production values, because (to be perfectly honest) I was too busy fuming at the director and writers to notice. Some of the user comments at the Internet Movie Database do mention Star Trek-like costumes and various anachronisms/goofs like crossbows and telephone poles.
If you want a real Arthurian romance, you're better off reading two of my all-time favorites, The Mists of Avalon and The Once and Future King. Both put a different spin on the legend, and do it well.
