Throughout the film King Arthur, we are led to believe that this may be a more “realistic” retelling of the story. Many of the mystical and magical aspects of the story are not present in the movie. Yet many historical inaccuracies exist as well. This begs the question: was the movie trying to be a more realistic version of the story of King Arthur or simply a different take on a well known story?
The answer I believe is a mix of the two. Magical events are often convenient ways of moving a story forward, but they are not very convincing. Pulling a sword from a “magical stone” was the focal point of many of the other versions of King Arthur. King Arthur the movie remedies those parts of the tale by ignoring them or not putting much emphasis on them. At the same time, realism is suspended in the movie for the sake of entertainment. Armor piercing crossbows and large longbow battle formations were not the way Romans or Saxons fought their battles. Roman “knights” were not present in their empire, at least not in the way the Knights of the round table were portrayed in the movie.
A more realistic representation of how a Roman soldier would look
What does this all mean for King Arthur as a movie? Its attempt at a different version of the classic tale shows an interesting version of Arthur as a man who is just like everyone else. He overcomes his trials through determination and faith instead of divine intervention (as he said in the movie, God was supposed to take his life, not the lives of his men) or magic. The viewer only needs to accept in this version that some of the historical information is not entirely accurate for the setting. Whatever take the creators of the movie were going for, they had considerable freedom because of the lack of real information on King Arthur as a person.
Getting Medieval 
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