The King. David Michôd. 2019. ☆☆☆★★★
OK, second movie of the night, and it’s a longer one.
I guess you could term this a… post-Game of Thrones historical drama? That is, it’s “gritty”. But it does aim for more realism than Game of Thrones, I guess: The hairstyles are bad and the actors have artfully greasy hair. And… I think that’s it? (I mean, Westeros is a fantasy land where they had invented shampoo.)
It’s pretty ridiculous and feels oddly small. I wonder what the budget was: Netflix only announces the budget when it’s megabucks, which makes me suspect that this had a smaller budget than web sites saying this is a “big budget” movie thinks. And it’s something about the crowd scenes: They only have enough extras for one line of people when they’re trying to do masses of soldiers. I guess they spent any money they had on that mud-bath at the end.
Moments where interest is snatched from the jaws of boredom come just often enough to keep you from switching to one of Netflix’s many other offerings, but it’s not enough to recommend starting The King in the first place.
This movie is just kinda annoying. I mean, to me: It’s a generally well-liked movie, so the stuff I find annoying is probably not what a lot of other people react negatively to. It’s stuff like how they just trust the images enough not to put a bed of dramatic “music” under most of the scenes. How the characters can deliver the most pompous lines without anybody finding them just a bit ridiculous. The way the colour grading makes everything beige. The way people are whispering-speaking.
It all just gets on my tits, but this isn’t a bad movie, really. I mean, not really. I guess it’s an original take on a war movie: Instead of being all “war is hell”, this is more “war is boring as fuck, dude”.
So I’m not sure whether this is a movie people who enjoy watching these kinds of movies will enjoy watching? Or perhaps the “progressive” tics of Henry V makes it a “yeah! dude!” kind of thing? The young guy with his magical, grizzled advisor proving all the fuddy-duddies wrong?
Anyway, I hate it.
This post is part of the NFLX2019 blog series.