Excalibur is a 1981 film telling a variation of the legend of King Arthur, co-written, co-produced, and directed by John Boorman. It stars Nigel Terry, Nicol Williamson, Helen Mirren, Liam Neeson (in his first film role), Patrick Stewart (in one of his early film roles), Cherie Lunghi, Robert Addie, and Nicholas Clay. The supporting cast includes, Gabriel Byrne, Boorman's children, Katrine and Charles, and Clive Swift. Over the years, there have been many variations of the Arthurian legend. This is definitely one of the darker one. Merlin (played by Williamson) was not the noble, wise wizard that he is in other variations, and this version of Arthur (played by Terry) grew up as a commoner only to discover who he was when he pulled Excalibur from the stone. It is very violent and there is some sexual content and nudity in the film.
The blu-ray release is very substandard. It did not receive a good HD transfer at all, and as a result the A/V quality is quite bad. The video quality is barely better than a DVD and the audio is out of sync at times. Also, the menu pages are very hard to navigate and barely respond when you push buttons on the remote. I initially thought the batteries in my remote were dying, but confirmed they were fine and it was an issue with the disc itself. As a result, depending on what blu-ray player you have, it may be hard to turn on captions or change the audio setting. The only bonus feature is a director's commentary by Boorman. It is also hard to access given the issue with the menu pages, but once you do, Boorman provides a lot of good information about the film and behind-the-scenes information.
The movie is okay, but not great. It is actually better if you watch it while listening to Boorman's commentary track, because you get a better idea of what he was going for but without that context, it just seems like the movie never really figures out how it wants to tell the story and does not tell a cohesive one. There are time jumps in the movie that make it hard to follow at times. But, they had to be used because Boorman wanted to tell the entire story of Arthur's life in a two-hour and twenty-minute film. The dialogue was not particularly well-written so, despite featuring many great actors, they did not have a lot of good material to work with. It is interesting to see Liam Neeson in his first film and Patrick Stewart early in his film career and Helen Mirren relatively early in hers. However, there are many other versions of the story that are much better than this one out there. Ultimately, you are not missing much if you skip this, but if you are a big fan of any of the actors or are really into the story of King Arthur, then it is worth checking out.
