First Knight (1995)

There is a particular melancholy in watching a studio spend ninety million dollars to remove the magic from Camelot and replace it with real estate. First Knight arrives as a medieval drama of considerable production value, all Welsh coastline and Pinewood interiors, and yet the enchantment has been systematically drained away. No sword in the stone, no Merlin, no sorcery. Just three adults negotiating a love triangle against a backdrop of competent swordplay and Jerry Goldsmith doing his level best on three and a half days of sleep. The film is not without craft. It is without whimsy, which for Arthurian material is a curious trade.

Julia Ormond's Guinevere governs Lyonesse with a clear head and a strategic marriage in mind, which grants her more agency than the genre typically allows a queen. She is a ruler first and a romantic prize second, though the film keeps dragging her back toward the second. Sean Connery's Arthur preaches justice, service, and the brotherhood of the Round Table at length, and these sermons are sincere. They are also feudal. A king extolling loyalty and honor is not delivering a modern social critique. He is delivering a medieval one, and the film has the good sense not to pretend otherwise. The cast is uniformly white, the romances are conventional, and no character pauses to interrogate the arrangement.

What remains is a handsomely mounted picture that mistook grimness for gravity. Richard Gere wanders through it with the breezy detachment of a man who has somewhere better to be, and Ebert was correct that he lacks the psychic weight to justify a kingdom. The result is an Arthurian tale stripped of wonder and furnished instead with realpolitik, which is a bit like serving a wedding cake made of gravel. Earnest, well tailored, and utterly convinced of its own seriousness. We have seen worse. We have rarely seen duller.