I live in a non-english speaking country so I didn't have to read 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight' in highschool. And I never played Pendragon nor Lion & Dragon.
But I like Dev Patel, so I watched Green Knight in the theatre yesterday. Let's just say I was not the target audience for this movie; maybe you all will get more out of it. Or not.
Beautiful imagery of the Irish/Scottish landscape, which you'll have ample time to admire as there isn't anything else happening in most of the movie. I did some search on Wikipedia after watchin the movie and I think they did a bit of a Hobbit on this one as well, adding characters and storylines to pad the original poem into a +2hrs art-house experiment.
So if you like Arthurian legends and people travelling and talking a bit between long minutes of silence, then this may be something for you.
But if you expect an action packed fantasy movie or a fun night at the cinema, another Excalibur or First Knight or A Knight's Tale or even Holly Grail, then this is not it.
Beautiful but boring.
I know I'm super late for this discussion, but I wanted to give my two cents on Gawain's casting.
I don't want to be a racist who disallows ethnically British people (and gifted/skilled actors) from appearing in ethnically British stories just because their race is historically inaccurate (whether that even makes sense for an ahistorical fantasy mythos). The pre-modern Arthurian mythos does feature ethnically/racially Moorish characters, including mixed-race characters like Feirefiz (who has been retroactively diagnosed with vitiligo too). So it wouldn't be completely absurd that some Romani or some hero out of the
Ramayana made their way all the way to Camelot and got themselves ingratiated with the nobility. Camelot never actually existed, so where it fits in a real world timeline isn't important. It could be in the distant future for all that it matters (which is the premise of at least two Arthurian adaptations I know of, one an 80s cartoon and the other a 90s RPG).
The part that
maybe doesn't fit is racebending Gawain and Morgan le Fay specifically as opposed to inserting a new British Indian knight without pre-existing baggage. I know the Arthurian mythos doesn't have a canon, but this implies a big difference in who Morgan and Arthur's parents were compared any of the known versions. Of course, I'm probably overthinking something that the production team never considered because it just wasn't relevant to the story they were trying to tell. Arthurian stories have that issue where they contradict each other because the author was trying to make a point rather than create a shared universe.
The story is about Gawain and the Green Knight. Who his grandparents were and how they met is irrelevant.
It's hardly the first time his family has been changed.
But if SJWs complain that other adaptations depict Gawain and Morgan as lily-white when they "should" be Indian...