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.
