Guinevere

Rating:
Summary: Awful Made For TV Garbage
Review: I'm a sucker for retellings of the King Arthur legend; I've read or watched as many of them as I could, from The Mists of Avalon (great book, lousy movie) to the film Excalibur to the musical Camelot to real oddities like John Steinbeck's abortive attempt to modernize the tale and Monty Python's zany parody of it. Guinevere is thus far the most horrible, uninteresting, slow-paced, poorly acted, poorly scripted, ill-conceived and pointless version I've come across. I liked Sheryl Lee in Twin Peaks and Noah Wylie in ER, but here they are as wooden as Merlin's staff. In their defense the writing is appalling and plotting inane, but they and the entire supporting cast take this gorgeous, emotionally complex myth and turn it to frozen muck. It's hard to have a romantic triangle when one of the characters hardly appears--Arthur is little more than a bit part in this film. Almost nothing of the original is retained--none of Arthur's knights appear as characters and the quest for the Holy Grail is completely omitted. The climax of the film is not the ferocious battle in which Arthur is killed by his illegitimate son; that never occurs in this travesty--Guinevere and Arthur live happily ever after and Lancelot simply goes away. No, the climax occurs when Guinevere tells the 5 rebel kings that they ought to give up Arthur and be part of Britian because it's the way to insure the future of the country, and shucks, they all agree and drop their weapons--I'm not kidding. I'd like to say SOMETHING good about this movie, but I can't even complement the hair-styles! Avoid this at all costs, no matter how devout an Arthurian you may be.