Pendragon - Das Schwert seines Vaters

Okay, the Burns family and their hangers on managed to do something I have not experienced in a long time. They put together a movie so appallingly bad on every level that after an hour I just could not take any more. Between this and more than 40 years of community theatre experience, and I have never seen an ensemble cast so uniformly awful. The community leader/father character has all the dynamic presence and leadership potential of a failed amateur junior assistant apprentice library book sorter trainee. And I don't mean that in a good way. Fortunately for him, he is not overshadowed by any of his supporting cast. These people could not convincingly play talentless actors; I don't believe any of the actors could play themselves. They are quite simply as untalented as people with no talent. It is impossible to feel engaged with any character, care about whether any character in the movie succeeds or fails or lives or dies. Impossible to imagine that any of them had any impact at all on the other characters, let alone the future of Britain. It is really difficult to see how any of these people inspired enough passion in each other to produce children. They are less than boring.

I was surprised to see that there were actually a handful of people involved in this movie not named Burns. It is not entirely unlikely to me that many of the people not named Burns are men married to women with the maiden name of Burns. Certainly none of the Burns family, extended family, and cluster of outsiders are any good at their respective jobs. About the only member of the production got anything right was the one who made sure that this Christian movie did not contain sex or profanity. It was obvious to me very quickly that whichever Burns was supposed to go to the library and do some research on fifth century weapons, tools, and so forth decided to look at some of the pictures in the Encyclopaedia Britannica and leave it at that.

Inconsistencies and functional impossibilities abound. Anachronistic weapons, siege machines, materials, and construction techniques litter the first hour. There is no way the invaders brought back many siege machines from across the sea, and no way they mass-produced the nearly identical plethora of ballistas in the field, and no way they did all that construction work without word having spread far and wide for leagues in every direction; the invaders' attacks wouldn't of been a surprise, because the locals would have been sitting around waiting for them (bad strategy) for weeks or months. It is improbable that an invading army could have produced so many "fire projectiles" that could be hurled effectively, and most unlikely that they would even bother. Looking at the construction of the village walls and such, they'd if not the place down just by launching large rocks at the place. Which would've been wiser … based on the firefighting training and experience I had, that place would've burned to the ground first night, turning everything worth capturing into smoking debris and ash. Apparently the invading horde were fifth century Burns family sackers as well.

One last thing. There are two roles not listed in the credits. One is the local tailor, who apparently buys modern fabrics from Kmart, and Owens a singer sewing machine. The other is the village hairdresser, who apparently owns a 411 A.D. model curling iron.

My roommate checked this movie out from the library, misled by the title. The hope was to find an Arthurian legend film that's better than "Merlin." That BBC series was, by comparison, the documentary staged brilliantly by the Royal Shakespearean Company. I'm surprised the DVD actually got to the library. This has the quality of something that bypassed the "straight to DVD bargain bin" quality assortment, and instead achieved "straight to rubbish bin" status before release.

Oh, and by the way, I didn't particularly like this film.

Amazing special effects/explosions looked around at least 8 Million in my opinion, but they did it for 80K, so kudos. Furthermore, 2 families dreamed this up in their basement and got volunteers to build a village (and then burn it down)--amazing vision, organization, and talent. (The final sword fight was one of the longest and best choreographed I have ever seen.) As for the plot, not bad--it felt like they were headed towards political intrigue and got side-winded towards more action instead--but still, very classic though a little hard to understand all the subtleties at times.

Main actors were good, but acting suffered most because 1. script doctor needed to tailor script to actors' personalities--not actors towards script 2. people acting because they had to 3. Acting with family members is difficult, especially when you're pretending to be in love with someone you're related to, which is a little awkward. 4. confusing storyline changes midway so the complex bad guy becomes simple near the end and some of the storyline nuances were lost.

But as for the historical inaccuracies, this film was remarkably accurate on several points: Firstly the realism (not hyper-realism with gritty and dirty people in undershirts) , Secondly the religious idealism of the Dark Ages (that many modern people do not understand), Thirdly the Roman-Briton civilization confronting the Saxon barbarians, (and putting the Saxon in their native tongue).

As for the religious element, it may make movie-junkies squirm--but the religious sentiment was quite different in the Dark Ages than it is in Hollywood now, and certainly shows a healthy form of idealism rather than the typical elitism found in critics' circles. My only complaint is that there could have been more Liturgical focus as is found in Catholic/Anglican churches, but still the historical effort was appreciated.

Overall, good film for the family but slightly violent for the sensitive at heart.

This is my first review in the IMDb, and I'm doing this just because I saw a terrible wasted film. In the beginning I really tried to see the best part of it. You think, "Oh, come on is a "C" movie, let's give a chance to this awful actor, or, the direction is not good but, let me just see it from another angle...." but is impossible. The main actor is simply worse then you can handle, you never see the face of the actors in front, the action take always more time then needed (is a problem with the cut), and it simply goes on ...

The movie lacks continuity, it doesn't make you want to keep watching it, is sad, could be just a great film.

I saw in the end, that was a family project, (that explain the non-convincing extras and other actors) but any way, a good director/ editor consulting would just be great. The idea is good, but is impossible to do a great film without a good protagonist (that was maybe the biggest mistake) and a good director.

The soundtrack could be done with a really low budget, it would make the film flow better...

It Burns? Certainly - it's wooden. Arthurian literature is full of Christian themes and references, which this religious movie tries to exploit too heavy-handedly.

I was looking for a film about King Arthur and/or Merlin and instead I got a Christian family made film about God and faith. There's little to no dialogue and when people do speak it's delivered terribly. This film has an agenda to tell history through the eyes of contemporary Pious people. It's almost comical when a completely inept (non) actor says "this is the gateway to Britain" with a Midwestern accent. For the first 15 minutes it was not clear who is who and what is what and why anything was happening. It was funny when the German Saxon had a Scottish accent though. It took 23 minutes to hear the father call-out the main character's name, "Arthur". The lack of dialogue other than when they speak about God's grace, is actually astounding. What a great disappointment to the story of King Arthur, who, it seems traveled with "knights" that likely were not religious at all. It was hard to watch the people pretending to act. I can not help wondering why they would have these people pretend to act, they're worse than amateur actors, they're worse than any High School musical I've seen. I've seen better acting on the stage of a Middle School. it was painful, I had to turn it off.