re: The Green Knight

Sean Connery did it better....

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I liked it a lot but without explanation most people won't enjoy the movie

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Yep.

I expected it to suck but I actually enjoyed it

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The Green Knight

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Show some respect. This guy is a long shot to be the next James Bond.

Right there with you, buddy. I feel like in order to enjoy it, you had to be steeped in the Arthurian legend. Or be really, really high.

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I read the poem in college so I was aware of the original story. It was a different take on it with some liberties taken on Gawain’s personality and the game, but I enjoyed it. I was also really, really high though, so maybe it was that.

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All this except I hated it. I thought it completely misunderstood the concept of chivalry, and decided to take a shite on the whole concept.

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I thought it completely misunderstood the concept of chivalry, and decided to take a shite on the whole concept.

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Could you expand on this? I thought it demonstrated the central character's failure to meet the demands of chivalry. Until the end

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That's how I viewed it as well. It's a meta-subversive take on the poem, its themes, and the monomyth in that it teases Gawain as an anti-hero only to double back and ultimately affirm all of the traditional aspects of the poem.

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Well said. And it’s somewhat diabolical that modern audiences are introduced to an Arthurian legend with this take-down.

Remember that the Knights of the Round Table were essentially the superheroes of that period. As the Teutonic cultures clashed and melded with the Romanized Christian culture, the people had to grapple with how to be virtuous in a warring feudal society. The attributes of chivalry; honesty, courage, faithfulness, chastity, selflessness, industriousness, piety, wisdom, honor, etc. were seen as the ideals.

Maintaining these ideals is hard, maybe even impossible, even for the superheroes.

The test of Gawain by the Green Knight can be compared metaphorically with the story of Job. The test is extreme beyond anything approaching normal. It’s actually mystical, dreamlike. And Gawain able to almost pass every test. His one failing seems trivial by the audience’s standards: he keeps the Green Knight’s wife’s glove, a token of love, a remembrance of the romantic encounter which Gawain considered in his mind, but did not act upon.

Think about our modern superheroes. The best stories are when the heroes are placed under stress and even make a bad choice under stress, but still are able to save the girl, the town, the country, the universe, etc.

First of all, this movie subtly changes the nature of the one who is doing the test. Morgana is not just a wild and chaotic force, conniving at times, fraught with bad character traits of jealousy, lust, selfishness, ruthlessness, etc., she is the embodiment or source of the malevolence. She IS the deceiver, the destroyer of dreams.

This movie sets out to prove the vision of Morgana. She is a post-modernist destroyer of the narrative of individual virtue.

The movie opens with Gawain in an elicit affair, being deceptive to his family, and to the court. His best trait seems to be his naïveté, not his considered wisdom. He seems to take the challenge of the Green Knight out of desire to prove himself, make a name for himself. He’s play acting chivalry, and he fails pretty spectacularly.

Then at the end, because the movie maker knows that the story is simply not compelling, “weak minded young soldier tries but does poorly”, he changes the message to something like, “but hey, he tried, and it was an impossible test anyway, so I’ll give him an A for effort.”

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I liked it a lot but without explanation most people won't enjoy the movie

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Agree with this. rewatched it last night and thought it was great. better on 2nd watch. the visuals are fantastic

glad to see that at least a few others in this thread understood it and enjoyed it as well

Very odd.
I randomly come across this thread, and then the post by Corinthians420, and see that his last post was on this day a year ago.
And then I think, good riddance.

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Think of the green knight poem as a “how to” guide for how chivalrous knights to behave.

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Well our modern definition of chivalry wasn't really the one used back in the days of actual knights and legends. Its changed a lot over the years actually and could mean a lot of different and sometimes contradictory things.... how we define it (essentially virtuous and duty-bound), it could mean that a man was just a good soldier, or a good horseman, or loyal to his woman, or even that he was a bit of a womanizer. The original poem was more about a man's honor or his word, his character when people aren't looking, than it was "chivalry" as we know it.

The movie kind of poo-poos the point the poem tried to make. But granted to make a movie out of it you do have to add some material because basically the poem goes "Green Knight shows up, Gawain takes a little off the top, then its a year later and he is at the lord's estate" with nothing at all there about the journey. Within the confines of what the movie is trying to do it does make sense that Gawain isn't honorable though...Gawain in the original story was already a famous knight by that point I believe, in this one he is using The Green Knight as kind of his "launchpad" for his career and he is very much not "knightly" at that point but becomes so at the end.