Director: Patrick Cormack
Writer: Patrick Cormack
Running time: 26mins
The renowned sociologist Emile Durkheim identified one of the key effects of modernity as a loss of enchantment. The rise to dominance of monotheistic transcendentalist religions alongside the empiricism of the scientific method largely displaced magic from mainstream cultural discourse. And yet, there appears to be a human need out there to partake in the immanence of the spiritual, and to bring animism – the personhood of things – into everyday life. Capitalism, with its ability to monetise any conceivable object or experience, is ready and willing to be of service. You can get faith healing crystals delivered to your door. And anyone else remember pet rocks?
At the same time, the search for the magical invariably involves the need to identify ancestors as spiritual beings, who can bring enchantment and meaning to life in the 21st century. In the Anglo-American cultural sphere, this phenomenon is vividly demonstrated by the enduring popularity of Arthurian legend. Arthur – the Celtic chieftain battling against evil foreign migrants – a story ready to be weaponised for modern elites. The current US chieftain’s mother’s first language was Gaelic. Capitalism continues to oblige.
J.R.R. Tolkien famously remarked, “there’s money in Celtic”. I suspect that Patrick Cormack had Tolkien’s advice in mind when making his short narrative film based on Arthurian legend – The Power of the Circle: The Pendragon 2025.
Cormack opens proceedings with a man and his grandson settling into a rented country cottage. In a positively antediluvian touch, as the scene opens – both are reading books. The boy is reading the fourth Harry Potter novel, which he tells the grandfather has just come out – so the movie is presumably set in the winter of 2000. All the action takes place, barring a couple of special effects-driven interludes, in the living room of the cottage.
The plot synopsis is as follows, with spoilers ahead (though many of them you may well have guessed by now).
The grandfather is revealed to be Merlin, a wizard and companion of Arthur. The grandson, we learn, has some unspecified magical powers. From a CGI sequence, we discover Queen Guinevere has entrusted her son, the Pendragon of the title, the offspring of her extra-marital relationship with Sir Lancelot to another knight of the Round Table – Sir Bedevere. We are warned that Dark Forces are out to nobble the boy. Sir Bedevere and the boy turn up at the cottage door in modern dress. The grandfather and grandson give them shelter. The Dark Forces arrive, assisted by CGI, and battle is joined. Naturally, the action takes place on the night of Winter Solstice and there is a howling gale and thunderstorm raging outside.
From the above outline, most IFL readers will conclude the target audience Cormack is aiming for must be adolescents, who have probably come to Arthurian legend through gaming, or an older cohort who are so immersed in things Arthurian that they are willing to suspend their critical faculties and wander through a second childhood. Cormack’s approach is fine as it goes but it depends for its success on providing the production values which the target audience will expect – unfortunately these are woeful – the filmmaking is extraordinarily inept throughout, with multiple strands of ineptitude.
First, there is the acting. Mercifully, the review copy of the movie provided no credits – so I am saved from having to name individual actors. The quality of acting is pretty much what one might expect from an amateur dramatic troupe – well-intentioned but one-dimensional. But particularly problematic is the performance of the lead character – the grandfather/Merlin. When the revelation that he is actually a powerful wizard comes – there is no change in the actor’s range – he bumbles along as the kindly grandfather. (Things are not helped here by the fact that, for UK viewers of a certain age, the actor’s appearance and oleaginous manner bears an unfortunate resemblance to that of a famous BBC children’s TV presenter of the 1990s later exposed as a paedophile sex predator.)
The screenplay, meanwhile, is pedestrian throughout. However, it becomes somewhat unhinged once the grandson is revealed to have magical powers. The boy, revelling in the reveal, proceeds to demonstrate his proficiencies by providing us with seemingly an entire lexicon of names and symbols; an endless list which would surely test the die-hard Arthurian enthusiast, let alone civilian members of the audience.
Perhaps the biggest issue, though, is the AI-generated CGI. Image-wise, it is passable. AI imagery of this kind gets worse the more it moves – but as most of it is delivering dialogue, the eyes and mouths of the characters warp minimally. But the device is introduced to shock-and-awe the audience, which is decidedly the wrong approach – not only because it’s not that remarkable to gaze upon, but even then, because it ends up underlining the inadequacies of the cast, setting and screenplay. There is a strident division between the CGI (the magical) and the everyday goings on in the cottage living room, when surely the point of the movie is that the characters in there have powers of enchanting, providing a bridge between the mundane and the magical – after all one is a potent wizard, and two are time travellers – yet we see no demonstration of those alleged abilities.
This problematic gap in the film’s delivery is emphasised from the first reveal of the CGI. Guinevere and Bedevere are sublime, beautiful human beings, sumptuously decked out. But the illusion of high-quality visual trickery immediately highlights how ludicrously inappropriate Guinevere’s AI generated voice is – its timbre and affect coming across as though she were trying to sell vehicle insurance, or as a particularly unhelpful doctor’s receptionist.
The above is a harsh review, but looking at the filmmaker’s profile, it is unlikely to knock them from their stride. They have made scores of movies, which already include a half-dozen with Arthurian themes – a rich seam to be mined. On the evidence before me, I am sure they will have encountered the odd negative review previously, and have continued regardless. I wish them well, and hope The Power of the Circle: The Pendragon 2025 brings rewards beyond dreams of avarice.
For IFL readers, though, I must add: life is too precious to spend 25 minutes watching this movie. If you are in search of the immanent – maybe kiss the spirit of a butterfly, or buy a pet rock or, even better, bring one back from the beach. But if you would like a bucket of cold water social science empiricism over your head instead, have a look at the historian Guy Halstall’s demolition of the historicity of the Arthur legends in Worlds of Arthur – remorseless and good fun.