This afternoon I had the misfortune of stumbling across an eighties film called 'Hawk The Slayer'. To me it represented the worst of what Hollywood considers a fantasy environment. A messenger is trying to find the hero, and suffers one terrible injury or obstacle after another, almost as if he was only playing out a counterpoint role, to make the hero look good.
The hero himself is solidly arthurian in motive, riding around the wilderness finding people to rescue from bandits and villains, who it must be said just seem to exist here and there with no reference to a world around them. A series of set piece scenes rather than a coherent narrative with a consistent backdrop. And yes, Hawk the Slayer carries a magic sword.
I can forgive films of the time for less convincing production, special effects and CGI are now so brilliant it's impossible to be impressed by a painted matte screen. Yet it all comes down to the same thing. Places are simply there to stage a scene, not because a scene needed to to be played out somewhere in the fantasy world.
So it's the screen writing that fails? Stories told by people who perhaps don't understand fantasy or who are simply writing entertainment as they see it. As a musician, I know full well how hard it is to write songs about things you haven't experienced yourself. Perhaps the same is true of film, so a screenwriter who's never read a fantasy novel and has only a passing familiarity with LOTR or Arthurian myth can't write convincingly in a genre that was never mainstream to begin with?
I couldn't finish the film. It did have some star actors in it who gave perfectly good performances, just that the hero was a typical Hollywood pretty boy of the time whose 'stand still and stare menacingly' technique was not exactly credible, though it may have been partially a directorial fault. In fact, on reflection, there were enough clues in the acting to realise this was a western in drag, with sudden death axe, knife, or sword action rather than Colt Peacemakers. The wrong style. No sense of character, motive, just a load of people bumping into each other with one side walking or riding away afterward. Awful. Truly awful.