Tristan & Isolde (20th Century Fox, 2006) Greetings, friends, and welcome to the last Ellsworth’s Cinema of Swords article, at least for a while. I’ve enjoyed hanging out with you here on the regular, but circumstances have changed for Your Cheerful Editor, and my writing output must adapt to accommodate them. For a good while, I had reached an equilibrium in my writing, balanced between work for the day-job at Larian Studios, making progress on my nine-volume Musketeers Cycle of…

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Wolfhound (Russia, 2006) The Barbarian Boom of the ‘80s was the first normalization of fantasy as a mainstream genre for the movies. As the boom faded in the ‘90s (Xena notwithstanding), it seemed as if fantasy film had been just another passing phase. But then, in the early 2000s, along came The Lord of the Rings and Pirates of the Caribbean series: the Second Normalization of Fantasy Film had arrived, and as we’re still living with it in 2024, it…

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Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (USA, 2003) It’s hard to remember now, but a mere quarter-century ago, the pirate movie genre was dead and over, ninety years of cheesy swashbuckling and occasional scalawag glory doomed to the ash-heap of history. And then, grinning with malice, pirate films rose like drowned zombies and shambled back to the screen, more raffish and rakehelly than ever. And who do we have to thank for this unforeseen and unholy…

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Historical adventure and fantasy films tend to be straightforward genre pictures long on plot and action and short on deep themes and introspection, which is okay, you can’t have everything. Or can you? Some ambitious filmmakers want it all, and are willing to risk losing an audience who expects simple action and adventure by giving them ideas to think about or visuals that are striking but hard to parse. Films with such vaulting ambitions often fall into the category of…

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Hero (China/Hong Kong, 2002) The Hong Kong cinema industry’s success as an action-film factory for 50 years starting in the 1960s has meant that most of the Chinese-language movies covered by Cinema of Swords originated there. However, once mainland China shook itself free of its painful Cultural Revolution, its own film industry began to reassert itself. Zhang Yimou was one of the new directors of the so-called “Fifth Generation” that emerged in the ‘80s and ‘90s. A native of Xi’an…

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Brotherhood of the Wolf (France, 2001) The boom in heroic fantasy novels in the wake of the success of The Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Conan revival means there is plenty of imaginative literary fodder available for film adaptations, providing heroes, villains, and plot structures ready-made for cinema. But there are also original fantasy films, of course, movies with stories and scripts written for the screen rather than drawn from books. These are often wilder and less moored…

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The Fellowship of the Ring (New Line Cinema, December 2001) Some of us waited a very long time for these movies — or at least, that’s how it felt. I grew up in the 1960s reading science fiction and fantasy; my father had read pulps like Weird Tales back in the ‘30s, and when those stories were republished as postwar paperbacks, he bought them and then passed them on to me. But I discovered Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy…

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Hornblower 1: The Duel (UK, 1998) When you think about swashbucklers at sea, two time periods come to mind: that of the pirates and privateers, from the 16th through 18th centuries, and the Napoleonic naval era at the beginning of the 19th. British captains and crew figure prominently in both these milieus, as you’d expect from an island nation that depended on sea trade and effective warfare on the waves. The British, of course, are proud of their naval heritage,…

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Dungeons & Dragons (USA/Czech Republic, 2000) Heroic fantasy on the big screen was in a parlous state at the dawn of the 21st century, and anyone whose crystal ball was foggy about the immediate cinematic future could be forgiven for thinking that swords and sorcery films were at their nadir. The Barbarian Boom was long past, Kull the Conqueror had been terrible, the Merlin miniseries was mediocre, and Xena: Warrior Princess had run its course. It was a grim time,…

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The Scarlet Pimpernel (UK, 1999) With his double identity, outlaw status, and penchant for disguise, the Scarlet Pimpernel may have been the clear template for Zorro, but in the novels, he was more secret agent than swordsman, and most screen adaptations have been light on the action side. The BBC’s 1999-2000 series of TV movies, in direct competition with ITV’s swashbuckling Hornblower shows, sought to rectify that imbalance. Richard Carpenter’s new version of the dapper outlaw of the French Revolution…

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