Several literary works have also done so, including David Gemmell's Ghost King, Jack Whyte's Camulod Chronicles, and perhaps the strongest influence on this film, Bernard Cornwell's Warlord series.

A group of Sarmatian knights and their half-British Roman commander Artorius Castus, known as "Arthur", have served their obligatory 15-year term fighting for Rome and are preparing to return home.

Arthur himself plans to continue his career in Rome until Bishop Germanus orders them to complete one final mission: evacuate an important Roman family from north of Hadrian's Wall, saving them from an advancing army of invading Saxons led by the ruthless Cerdic and his son, Cynric.

He discovers a cell complex containing several dead Woads and two tortured survivors — a young woman named Guinevere and her younger brother Lucan.

The night before the battle, he and Guinevere make love, and on the following day, Arthur meets Cerdic under a white flag of parley, vowing to kill him.

The film was produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and directed by Antoine Fuqua; David Franzoni, the writer of the original draft script for Gladiator, wrote the screenplay.

I mean, it's set in the Dark Ages, when people were inconsiderate and decided to bleed everywhere.”[4] The film's storyline is not taken from traditional sources but is a work of creative fiction.

For example, the film's portrayal of a boorish and lusty Bors, the father of many children, differs greatly from his namesake, whose purity and celibacy allowed him to witness the Holy Grail.

The cinematic portrayal of Guinevere as a Celtic warrior who joins Arthur's knights in battle is a drastic contrast to the "damsel in distress" found in many courtly romances.

However, in some Welsh sources, Gwenhwyfar is attributed supernatural strength; and in one later Irish text, her daughter Melora is a trained warrior; so this portrayal is not entirely without textual precedent.

The role of the traitor, often ascribed to Mordred, is given a smaller part in the form of a young British scout, played by Alan Devine, who betrays his people to the Saxons.

Italian historian and novelist Valerio Massimo Manfredi claimed that the movie was almost a plagiarism of his 2002 novel The Last Legion, due to several similarities between the two works.

[6] These similarities include the reuse of some tropes and happenings present in the book and, especially, the attempt to give historical reliability to the main characters with the concept of King Arthur having Roman origins.

Indeed, the events of the movie suggest a theory that is largely different from the one on which Manfredi's novel is based, in which Artorius Castus isn't even mentioned, and neither is the Sarmatian auxiliary army.

[7] On Rotten Tomatoes, King Arthur has an approval rating of 31% based on 190 reviews being positive with the critics consensus being "The magic is gone, leaving a dreary, generic action movie".

[9] David Edelstein of Slate called the film "profoundly stupid and inept" and added, "it's an endless source of giggles once you realise that its historical revisionism has nothing to do with archeological discoveries and everything to do with the fact that no one at Disney would green-light an old-fashioned talky love triangle with a hero who dies and an adulterous heroine who ends up in a nunnery.

"[10] A. O. Scott of the New York Times further remarked that the film was "a blunt, glowering B picture, shot in murky fog and battlefield smoke, full of silly-sounding pomposity and swollen music (courtesy of the prolifically bombastic Hans Zimmer).

"[11] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times had a more positive response to the film and awarded it three out of four stars, writing, "That the movie works is because of the considerable production qualities and the charisma of the actors, who bring more interest to the characters than they deserve.

There is a kind of direct, unadorned conviction to the acting of Clive Owen and the others; raised on Shakespeare, trained for swordfights, with an idea of Arthurian legend in their heads since childhood, they don't seem out of time and place like the cast of Troy.

[5] Rowland pointed out that several Arthurian novels are set in the Dark Ages, like Rosemary Sutcliff's Sword at Sunset and Mary Stewart's Merlin trilogy (The Crystal Cave, The Hollow Hills and The Last Enchantment).

In response to criticism of the setting, a consultant on the film Linda A. Malcor said: "I think these film-makers did a better job than most could have done when it comes to giving us something besides knights in tin foil and damsels in chiffon.... [they] deserve a lot of praise for the effort that they made.

Several scenes are also omitted from the director's cut, including one where the knights sit around a campfire asking about their intended Sarmatian life, in which Bors reveals that his children do not even have names, most simply have numbers.

Despite these many drastic diversions from the source material (including the Welsh Mabinogion), the producers of the film attempted to market it as a more historically accurate version of the Arthurian legends.