Sunday, November 28, 2021

Two Paragraph Review: Green Knight (2021)

 

There's a lot of things going on in Green Knight visually and on some hard-to-gauge high concept stage. People tell dramatic snippets of epic-sounding tales and heads do come off without actually killing their owners. For the Arthurian myth, that is all more than appropriate and the great cast runs with it from the initial setup when the hero's great adventure begins. Which is all well and good.

What's less so is the fact that the movie feels very improvised and somehow physically restrained. All of its locations seem like some kind of a failed site scouting job, where any old castle, forest, meadow, or field would do. The photography of Green Knight is not bad in the technical sense, but the emotional tone it emits is ringing hollow. In many ways, that ringing resonates with the whole film, giving it a nice-looking, but going-nowhere feel throughout.