As 2024 heads to a close I am trying to make a concerted effort to see and review some of the major films I have missed over the last three or four years.  These are titles that, for one reason or another, I had avoided seeing or just never had a strong opportunity, but have been able to find recently.  In this case, The Green Knight is a moody medieval tale that I had skipped because I had little interest.  I had read the origin book, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” some forty years ago for a college course and didn’t care for it then.  Now I’ve seen the movie, which may be worse (although, to be fair, I don’t remember the book at all, so that may not be true).

David Lowery’s film introduces a lusty, ne’er do well prospective knight, Gawain (Dev Patel) who, in order to make something of himself, accepts the challenge of a very mysterious Green Knight (Ralph Ineson, in a lot of treebark makeup or sfx) to a fight.  Gawain wins, but has to travel to the Green Knight’s lair one year later to allow the Green Knight to strike a return blow.  Gawain’s quest is long, tedious, confusing, mysterious, mystical and all the things I hate about fantasy, but finally he reaches his goal, only to run away.  Then the real conclusion occurs and things are just as mysterious and confused.

I cannot express how much I hated this movie.  What the director intends to be mystical and enigmatic comes across to me as confused and meaningless.  The starkly realized landscapes, caves, forests, marshes, castles and villages may be historically accurate and believable but they are also colorless and boring.  Gawain is a dissolute character who wants to be the man he should be, yet he is doesn’t understanding anything anybody tells him, is captured by children on his quest, cannot help but fall prey to any hot medieval wench that crosses his path and cannot even accept his own personal destiny.  Dev Patel looks the part but I don’t think he ever gets to the heart of his character — or perhaps the hazy script never provides him the proper characteristics to perform.

Now I will be the first person to admit that I am not the proper audience for this particular movie.  Fans of medieval literature (are there any such people?) may well find the story’s flights of fancy, which include giant nude women walking through a misty valley and a talking fox, rather imaginative and even evocative.  For what purpose, I ask?  What the hell is this story’s moral or aesthetic purpose?  I didn’t understand it back in the early ’80s and it is no clearer to me now.  I’m pretty sure I received a “D” grade for the class in which I read this story, and that is what I am rating this misfire of a movie.  ☆.  7 December 2024.