Here's a taste of what the critics are saying about The Green Knight - and why reaction has been largely positive thus far. Directed and adapted by David Lowery, The Green Knight is an ambitious retelling of 14th century poem, Sir Gawain & The Green Knight, in which one of King Arthur's Round Table cohorts makes a deal with a mysterious warrior (the eponymous Green Knight) that will one day claim his life. Dev Patel (Skins, Slumdog Millionaire, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) plays Sir Gawain, and he's joined by Alicia Vikander as Lady Esel, Sarita Choudhury as Morgan Le Fay, Sean Harris as King Arthur, Erin Kellyman as St. Winifred, Kate Dickie as Queen Guinevere, Joel Edgerton as The Lord, and Ralph Ineson as the Green Knight himself.
Filmed in 2019 with digital effects from Peter Jackson's renowned Weta company, The Green Knight had the misfortune of being lined up for a March 2020 festival premiere ahead of a May public release, but owing to the effects of COVID-19, that didn't happen. Even now, The Green Knight's plight isn't over; Lowery's film is out in the U.S. as of July 30th, but was recently pulled from U.K. schedules due to ongoing pandemic uncertainty.
In better news for The Green Knight, reviews have been mostly positive. At the time of writing, Rotten Tomatoes gives a critics' score of 90%, although the audience rating sits much lower at 65%. Early signs suggest The Green Knight could be a hit with reviewers more than a general audience, but what are the first wave of write-ups saying?
“The Green Knight,” in taking it seriously, isn’t always an easy film. But by the time Gawain reaches his journey’s end, in as moving and majestically sustained a passage of pure cinema as I’ve seen this year, the moral arc of his journey has snapped into undeniable focus.
It is scary, sexy, and strange in ways that American films are rarely allowed to be, culminating in a sequence that cast the whole film in a new light for this viewer. We're all just sitting in that banquet hall, listening to the story requested by King Arthur, told by a master storyteller.
By way of darkly sumptuous settings and sweepingly expansive landscapes. “The Green Knight” doesn’t aspire to the bedazzlements of John Boorman’s 1981 Arthurian classic “Excalibur,” but the production, designed by Jade Healy, and the cinematography, by Andrew Droz Palermo, bespeak the solitude of the period.
To disguise a film so artful and boldly uncommercial as mass-market entertainment for those still hurting from Game of Thrones’ conclusion – there’s your act of heroism.
Lowery’s unforgettable adaptation refuses to do the math for us, but it’s all the more thrilling for how it insists that the only true value of a thing in this world is that which we find in it for ourselves.
All of which makes “The Green Knight” a vital and fascinating artifact. If “The Lord of the Rings” undergirds “Star Wars,” and the King Arthur saga undergirds “The Lord of the Rings,” what are we to make of a misty, lavishly scaled medieval odyssey, full of ghosts and magic and hallucinations and wandering, that adapts — and does its best to stay true to — “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,”
From the selection of reviews above, it's clear that The Green Knight is a visual feast in which David Lowery transforms an ancient mystical poem into a believable and cinematic world full of wonder and spectacle. Dev Patel's Gawain is also widely heralded for his hero's journey, and it's evident that The Green Knight's protagonist serves as the story's heart and soul throughout, full of intricacies and intrigue, light and shade, bravery and uncertainty. All of the above outlets seemed to enjoy The Green Knight's ambiguous subversiveness. Clearly, this is not a conventional Hollywood blockbuster, and most critics have praised how Lowery manages to concoct a unique experience out of a tale over 700 years old. Alas, many of The Green Knight's positive reviews admit that this very quality risks alienating casual audiences, or those who might've been expecting a more traditional fantasy epic full of adventure and action. The Green Knight is not that, and while some critics interpret this as a positive, a few have leaned the other way.
Sex and violence are, in this context, nothing more than cheap effects to be used whenever Lowery wants to get a rise out of viewers. A handful of semen and an unexpected kiss on the lips are, in that sense, just as ridiculous as Gawain’s ostensibly awe-inspiring discovery of a herd of naked giants.
CNN:
"The Green Knight's" sheer originality makes the film worth considering for anyone with a taste for such material. Whether that merits the pilgrimage to a theater as opposed to the comfort of one's castle could well be a horse -- or knight -- of a different color.
As predicted, the biggest problem with The Green Knight appears to be the unusual tone - whether that be the indie sensibility wrapped within mainstream visuals or, indeed, the "handful of semen." There appears to be a divide over whether The Green Knight is an artistic triumph, or pretentiousness without purpose, and while the majority of reviews are championing the former, some are less inclined to tolerate how Lowery challenges his audience.
The Green Knight is perhaps not a film you'd relax to after a long day at work. But for those seeking a thought-provoking, visually-stunning exploration of honor and heroism in a fascinating and magical setting, The Green Knight could provide an experience like no other.