On Friday I watched 2021's THE GREEN KNIGHT. I really liked it! I had a good time! I am not a person who knows or understands movies, particularly contemporary movies (whereas when I'm having attacks of confidence, I can usually acknowledge I have Some book knowledge)!
I did, however, do a seminar in medieval literature and so I've studied the actual text of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" and similar poems.
The thing I really liked about THE GREEN KNIGHT is that it FEELS like an adaptation of the 14th century poem, instead of an adaptation of a modern text based on a telephone game version of an Arthurian legend hodgepodge. It's dirty and unglamorous and sexual, instead of pristine chivalric. None of these things mean it's drab, though. I'm used to people approaching the Arthurian legend with a heavy chivalric fantasy lens, with genre fiction writers especially leaning into the fantasy element, or armed with the HISTORICAL FIGURE OF KING ARTHUR mindset which for some reason translates as drab still historically inaccurate stabbing with horses.
(There is a third popular approach, which is weirdass time travel reincarnation but I think that's mostly in books and comics.)
When I say THE GREEN KNIGHT is dirty, I mean it in a textured way, rough and crumbling stone, scrubby moss, sticky blood, lived in and rotting in a natural way. Because the thing about THE GREEN KNIGHT is that it hits the strange space medieval literature was created in by acknowledging and embracing the clash between the pre-literate paganism and the literacy brought with Christianity (moreso than the centuries after the fact recordings of stories from Norway and Iceland). David Lowery clearly favours the natural pre-Christian state and a return to same, which may be the most modern aspect of the adaptation, with the King and Queen heavily adorned with holy imagery while being sickly and faded even when compared to the Mother, and the first thing Gawain encounters leaving the city being the rotting remains of a massive battlefield being pecked over by scavengers. Things become more vibrant and alive the further Gawain gets from this core of Christian civilization, even though it becomes increasingly dangerous.
In a lot of medieval literature, we encountered a tendency where the non-Christian elements were TOTALLY RAD while we also had to acknowledge the order and rules and hierarchy of Christianity was Good, even if it wasn't nearly as TOTALLY RAD as a half-demon baby biting off the nipples of many, many wet nurses.
Even though Lowery's take on the inevitable return to nature is contrary to the righteous Christian goals of the original text (although not so much in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" as it is in other works), the result is much the same in the nature of Gawain's quest. The strangeness and danger and beauty of the natural world, the conflict of chivalric codes and the rules of folklore, the fact that the plot stems from Gawain's flaws as a person. Strange things happen and they're accepted with minimal question. A part of the world that is frightening but still known to exist.
Portrayed by Dev Patel, Gawain's flaws are less character flaws than they are the correctable flaws of youth. He's impulsive, quick to act and slow to think, and naïve in both halves of the world. It lets the character journey become one of maturation through the quest, rather than being an archetype going through the steps of a quest.
It was just a good time. Beautiful and sometimes hypnotic and ambiguous in a way I appreciate both because of the inherently ambiguous, 'lost' nature of these source texts, and also because it makes the real goal of the quest an inner question of self without tying it to outside validation for Gawain.