The Green Knight is undoubtedly a slow-moving film. It sweeps over Gawain as he traverses the misty, almost post-apocalyptic landscape. There are frequent suggestions of bloody battles happening around him, though we don’t see them on screen. It’s as though Gawain is always too late for the action, and that he’s running out of time to become a real knight before the world forgets about chivalry and epic quests.
Read MoreWhich is all well and good, but the film doesn’t encourage us to cheer her on. We’re not given much evidence of her unhappiness with her family, and so she comes across as impulsive and entitled. Later on, she reacts inexplicably coldly to a violent act perpetrated by Jay, and it’s hard to tell how we’re supposed to feel about it. Then, despite being given many opportunities to part ways, Samira and Jay drift into something resembling a romance, though they have very little chemistry (unless evidence of it got buried in one of the many travelling montages). It adds up to be a rather uninspiring amount of character work, with no clear purpose.
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