It's hard to watch the story of Excalibur at certain points without recollecting Monty Pytyhon and the Holy Grail. This is not John Boorman's fault any more than it was Robert Bresson's when he made Lancelot of the Lake (both of which take the Arthurian legend and tell it with a straight face and upstanding production value). I chuckle at seeing Camelot (and it IS a model indeed), and when Arthur has to face off against Lancelot. But Boorman is so good a director as to still take me out of satire and into the real bloody guts and thrills and drama (or really fantastical melodrama) of this story.
Excalibur does start a little shaky on some silly ground, or just a little like "huh, really?" This comes early when Merlin sets to task the impressionable and fiery Uther Pendragon to have his 'love' with the maiden, and has him cross the 'dragon's breath' (which is just fog) on his horse to ride over to her and so Merlin can do 'his thing' to which he'll have to recover in nine moons. Immediately I started to think "yes, this is well-directed, but I can't shake off the connection that the same man made the inexplicable Zardoz." And here and there Boorman goes into such strange and macabre territory that is a little bonkers; sometimes this works well, such as when Morgana puts into effect her plan to have her son with her brother, King Arthur, and it's done in such a way that is chilling and dark and evil, and just right.
But once Boorman gets into the Arthur legend, of pulling the sword from the stone and becoming knighted by another who looked under him, and then met Lancelot and Guinnevere and had his ups and downs with Merlin and so on, it becomes more and more satisfying. The actors are well-suited for such material: Nigel Terry as Arthur and Nicholas Clay as Lancelot have very direct, two-dimensional characters and they play them as if they were the superheroes of their time, conflicted, troubled, and just a little uneasy in the Dark Ages, but willing to do what it takes when the time comes. And other actors, like Helen Mirren, just eat up the scenery in a delicious kind of way (she doesn't quite start like that, but in the last act as she's the villainess she really is something).
Best of all though is Merlin. Whenever Nicol Williamson comes on the screen the film comes alive in a manner that is hard to describe. He just knows how to add the right inflections in the speech, get the right walk and the distinctive stare at Arthur or Morgana, and while his character starts off questionably (taking Arthur from his mother so soon after birth, you say), he makes his character believable and awesome every step of the way. Hell, he even looks the bad-ass when surrounded in a block of ice! All of this benefits Boorman as he takes his story to some epic heights. Very little of it, in fact, is dated because when visual effects or models are implemented they aren't the kind that stick out. Today an Excalibur would be filled with CGI, perhaps even for the metallic clang of the swords. Here, everything is costumes and real forests, castles and armor, body parts flying and blood spilling generously in those battle scenes (or just in any given scene there's some violence).
Like Bresson with his 1974 film, Boorman is an iconoclast with his images. He wants things to stick in the viewer's mind long after they end (for me one of those in this case is the scene where Perceval is hanging from the tree and is near death but dreams of something crazy as he's being accidentally cut down). But where Bresson meant for his Arthur to be seen in a more subdued manner with his typical withdrawn non-professional actors, Excalbur is meant as popular entertainment for the masses. This is something that could conceivably be a family film, albeit the generous bloodletting and the occasional gratuitous female nudity. Excalibur takes its source seriously enough to make it work, and without it slipping at least too far into its own parody. Some lines, to be sure, may be delivered very over-the-top, and a particular moment with Morgana near the end is kind of laughable in a sick way. But in general, this is astonishing work of a professional variety. It gets the adrenaline moving when it needs to, and settles an audience in for those "talky" scenes just right.
