chekovpavelandreievich:

the ultimate issue I had with the green knight was that, to me, it didn’t fulfill the promise it made either to the audience or to the story

first I will say how beautiful! brilliant! cinematic gold and absolutely batshit weird in the best of ways

and that was the promise at the outset - this film will be weird, it will be dark and lovely, and it will tell us the full tale. lowery et al do an incredible job of making medieval symbols (the holly branch, the girdle) feel presciently modern at the outset, and that led me through the film with such a thrill. the first half, I was completely on board with the small shifts and additions, because we had the imagery SET and tone felt RIGHT and I was rearing to get to the castle!

and that’s where it fell apart a bit.

from the beginning we can see that this adaptation makes Gawain greener (hmm) than he is in the poem (to my reading at least!). here, he’s consumed with shame for his lack of experiences and he buries that shame in being a bit of a carousing brat. at the beginning, that choice made a lot of sense to me, and dev patel imbues such depth and pathos with every glance that who could complain. but the story is one of cycles and growth and return and Gawain has to grow to be able to go back. that was the first failure at the castle and to the story. it’s important to get at his cleverness, to see him be able to spar with the lady without being immediately overcome. his greed and fear should win out, but only just. and of course the importance of sets of threes - I would have liked to have seen it, especially in a movie that has already established how beautifully it can render a medieval symbolic device into a narrative device that makes sense today (without full knowledge of the story, even).

so the unfulfilled game leads to an unfulfilled chapel. the cyclic unity of the three strokes and the final nick - why not lean in? in some ways I can understand the desire for ambiguity at the end, but the ambiguity is there in the poem too, if you let it. if you look for Gawain’s shame you’ll see it ringing out. the girdle was rightly focused on but its promise is left untied. why not let Gawain go back to Camelot, ostensibly a hero who’s won the game, but really still a lad who wears green about his waist as a reminder of failure? the real pathos and pain is him having to see the court take up the symbol of his fear and make it a joke, turn it to something meaningless. that’s the unfulfilled promise to the story, and the audience too, because we miss gawain’s growth away from greenness and into a kind of adulthood that’s filled with great quests and destiny, but also pain too. 

but perhaps I’m too harsh. gawain’s question, “is this all there is?” is the right thing to ask and that line alone might drive at some of the movie’s deliberate lack of fulfillment. because one way or another, yes. that is all there is.  

mariacallous:

“In the beginning the First Gay Disney Character appearance was spaced by twenty-four weeks, then twelve, then six, then every two weeks. The last one, in Jungle Cruise, was a week. In four days, we could be seeing the First Gay Disney Character every eight hours until they are coming every four minutes.”

insurrectionary-frybreadism:

Very cold take but the reason I think a lot of settler vegans view meat as murder (and therefore immoral) is because they cannot get past their colonial mindset of viewing all interactions as either consumption or domination instead of the reality of a vast web of mutually beneficial and self sustaining relationships with the ecosystem and eachother

i think what’s getting me most about this movie other than all the other changes is that lowery flipped gawain inside out. in the poem gawain is a man who wants to live honorably, who is trying to do the right thing in order to feel like he belongs at court, who refuses the lady’s advances, who respects lord bertilak as a host and agrees to his game, but who ultimately does not reveal the sash to the green knight. he fails to live up to his principles because his fear of death is stronger than his desire to be honorable.

dev patel’s gawain is not interested in honor: he sleeps with a prostitute but refuses to be with her legitimately, he is reluctant to help a dead girl out of goodwill, he gives in to the lady, he won’t play the game with bertilak. he isn’t looking for moral goodness in order to feel like he has earned a place at court, he wants notoriety— a story that will become legend. but he gives up the sash in the final moment, because he realizes that honor is worth more than his fear of death.

have v mixed feelings about this movie. i think all the inclusions that weren’t in the poem really threw the movie and muddied the plot a ton for no reason. but then i am just a sucker for like arthurian courtly love honor valor blah blah and this adaptation was trying to take a different look @ those values which is fine but just isn’t my personal favorite. production design went off the music and costumes and whole setting were completely perfect. It could’ve been gayer definitely. but dev patel was hot <3

when he travels for weeks in the woods with no horse to give you a return blow but he won’t give you a return handy 😔

imlizy:

my fellow monk at the monastery of four elements after i fail to execute my devastating updog joke on a fellow brother of the order: clearly you didnt own the air friar

livingboy:

name one good thing that’s happened in society since rabb.it shut down