I heard this story, that may be apocryphal, about a librarian who was so opinionated about movies that she refused to watch any movie that contained a sword.
Recently I watched two different movies that prominently featured swords. And I thought they weren’t so bad at all.
The first sword movie I watched was Asoka, a sprawling three-hour Bollywood period epic. It’s about the historical figure of Ashoka the Great, an iron-age warlord who’s famous for obliterating the world’s first parliamentary monarchy, and then feeling so bad about it that he devoted his life to the proliferation of Buddhism.
Asoka stars Shahrukh Khan as the titular hero, and like you might expect, instead of focusing on personal enlightenment and wise edicts about peace and understanding, they focused on the warlording that lead up to it.
There’s a couple of scenes where he uses a double-bladed spring-steel razor-whip. Buddhism could never compete with that.
The second sword movie was the much anticipated, Outlander, the vikings versus space dragon actioner that never made it to theaters in Austin.
It was okay. The period costumes were a little silly, but there was plenty of blood and guts. It was a little disappointing that when you get right down to it, this was just another film rehashing of Beowulf. I mean, c’mon, Hollywood. Vikings did things other than fight marauding monsters. They raped the Irish. And the French. And some Saxons.
Couldn’t they make a movie about that? Hollywood will never learn.