King Arthur did not know Eastern martial arts.

My fiancee recently told me I should talk about some stuff I like instead of just trashing things I don't. I intend to take her advice, but first I have to rant about a couple more movies.

Clive Owen as King Arthur is pretty awful casting, for starters. Owen makes a good Byronic hero, but not a good traditional hero; Arthur is about as traditional as they come. Sure, the legend probably has roots in some small-time Celtic horse thief, but that's beside the point. The legend of King Arthur and his knights is one of chivalry, purity, honor, and bravery.

Not one of conflicted heretics fighting the baddies using techniques that weren't even developed yet, let alone in pre-Medieval Britain. Even the heresy part is all mixed up: Pelagius was active till his death in the early 5th century; historians agree that Arthur (whoever he was) probably fought off the Saxons in the 6th century; and, Roman Britain was a thing of the past even before the death of Pelagius.

Oh, and who had the brilliant idea of dressing Keira Knightley in "woad" and giving her a bow and arrows (a long bow and arrows, no less).....while having the audacity to call her Guinevere? It's all so absurd and disgusting I don't even know how I made it to the final credits. It's not to my credit that I did.

Even the rest of the cast couldn't save this movie from being terrible: Ioan Gruffudd, Mads Mikkelsen, Ray Winstone, and Til Schweiger as Arthurian Knights is a fantastic idea, unless you have a script someone pasted together from the advertising section of Men's Health and the kind of historical accuracy you'd expect from a six-year-old whose entire knowledge of the past is predicated on some parody he read in Mad.

But none of those elements were why I hated this movie so much (they just added to my feelings of antipathy). I hated King Arthur (2004) because they took an essentially Christian legend and "demythologized" it to the point of senselessness.

And who cares if Arthur wasn't originally a Christian figure? All the extant versions of the story we have are explicitly Christian in their symbolism and imagery. Arthur's death predicted by Merlin; his return at the hour of Britain's darkest need to save Albion; the Summerland kingdom as a result of his return, a paradisiacal time of plenty and peace? Arthur is clearly a Christ-figure.

In this movie, however, he's a bloodthirsty brute with exotically-armed friends who kill everyone while believing that all people have some good in them and that Christ's atoning sacrifice is a theological invention. Or one would assume they believed this, given the Pelagian influence; if not, they're even dumber than they look (a true feat indeed!).

I'm just sick of things having to be reinvented, especially when they're reinvented from glorious awesomeness to resemble nothing so much as Eckhart Tolle with hair on his chest and someone else's blood under his fingernails. It's all absurd, and it's all garbage. And how many people are going to think Arthurian legend is just about feminism, New Age ideals, and carnage after seeing this "movie"? Too many, I do indeed fear.

If Hollywood suddenly blew away in the wind and all the bad movies it's churned out with it, I'm not sure if I'm the only one who'd be celebrating, but I am sure it would be good for everyone. I'll probably have to be content to never watch this sad excuse for cinema again.