I want to be free. Let me be free! Also, freedom is important.

Here's a lovely article by Ursula K. Leguin about the predictably terrible things that were done to her work in its translation to the small-and-petty screen. I dig the term "McMagic", which can be used in all corners of geekdom: "McSpace", "McBot", "McVamp", etc.

And now for a practical application.

We downloaded and watched King Arthur, which was of course a real McSword yawner. Well, OK, we watched the first half. Then I previewed bits of the second half, including the climax; after that, we decided not to finish it.

I detected something in the movie, like they were trying to make the plot turn around a theme of some sort. See if you can pick it out from the following quotes.

"It's the natural state of any man to want to live free."

"And if in Your wisdom, You should determine that sacrifice must be my life for theirs; so that they can once again taste the freedom that is so long been denied to them, I will gladly make that covenant."

"No, I choose life! And freedom! For myself and the men!"

"Well now that we're free men, I'm gonna drink 'till I can't piss straight."

"Knights! The gift of freedom is yours by right. But the home we seek resides not in some distant land, it's in us, and in our actions on this day! If this be our destiny, then so be it. But let history remember, that as free men, we chose to make it so!"

"For two hundred years knights had fought and died for a land not their own, but on that day on Badon Hill all who fought put their lifes in service of a greater cause: freedom."

I'm not entirely sure, but I suspect that the script used the words "free" and "freedom" more free-quently than a speech by George W. Bush. The scriptwriter is listed as David Franzoni, whom I picture to be a basically nondescript fellow wielding a great maul with the word "FREEDOM" stamped on the business end, which he uses to bang away at his keyboard when he's writing. IMDB lists his previous credits as Gladiator (2000) and, before that, Amistad (1997). I think that things got a little out of hand in his study in '97, and he ended up with some kind of writing-gimmick addiction.

At the very least, he could have used a thesaurus. What's wrong with "unfettered", for example? "Autonomy"? "Liberate"?

<nerd>Setting that aside, an obsession with freedom seems to me to be a fine feat for characters hailing from the Dark Ages. Franzoni attempted to lend some credibility to the anachronism by making the heretical monk Pelagius a character in the film, and a freedom-loving mentor to Arthur. Not a bad brainstorm: Pelagius hailed from the right part of the world, lived at about the right time, and did indeed say a thing or two about freedom. But anyone who knows that much about him would probably also know that he cared about freedom in the theological sense that (in his opinion) humans could freely will to do good without divine assistance. I rather doubt he had any touchy-feely concerns about the more worldly issue of Roman imperialism, or what happened to one Roman soldier (Arthur)--not to mention the rest of the protagonists, who were (Christ Almighty) a bunch of Godforsaken Pagans.</nerd>