Movie Review: Robin Hood (2018)

“I’m guessing you’d be up for a little redistribution of wealth?”

When I saw this movie in the theatre, I hated it. I don’t usually demand historical accuracy from medieval films. I mean, I really like Braveheart, so that gives you a sense of how low my standards are. But the 2018 Robin Hood took inaccuracy to a new level.

For instance: semi-automatic crossbows, urban guerilla/parkour fighting in “Arabia,” draft notices hand-delivered to random lords, architecture evocative of Blade Runner, and evil villains wearing collarless blazers like something out of The Matrix.

When I thought the movie was trying to be medieval, I thought of it as a failure. I should have paid more attention to the opening voiceover that told me to “forget the history,” because rewatching the film—knowing what to expect—I completely changed my mind. If we watch this film not as a medieval or even “medieval” movie, but instead as a pastiche, it’s rather brilliant. Not, to be clear, actually good. But it is a glorious mess that has a fun time making an inarticulate argument about our present day.

Taron Egerton plays Rob(in) of Loxley, a minor lord in Nottingham who is drafted into the Third Crusade. There, he has an enemies-to-bromance encounter with Jamie Foxx's Little John, which blossoms into a cohabitating friendship when the two return to England.

Nottingham is mob-bossed by Ben Mendelsohn as the sheriff. Paul Anderson is one of his henchmen and, like Egerton's Rob, a veteran of the crusades. Eve Hewson (Bono's daughter) is Maid Marian. While Rob was deployed, she fell in love with the maybe-treacherous Will, played by Jamie Dornan.

The plot is... well, it's Robin Hood. You know the basics. Rob and Little John, along with Friar Tuck (Tim Minchin) do what they can do defeat the evil Sheriff of Nottingham, aided—and sometimes hindered—by Will and Marian.

The aesthetics are what matter most. I’m not kidding about the clothes, which draw on fashion trends from the past 700 or so years. Or the accents, which are all over the map of both the UK and Ireland. Many of the inhabitants of Nottingham work in coal mines, which is the movie’s excuse for lots of flying sparks and even molten metal, similar to scenes in Peaky Blinders, which I’ll remind you was set in the twentieth century.

There are also the action-movie scenes, like a cart chase (yes, you read that correctly), the aforementioned urban warfare with archery, a money heist, a medievalish-but-not-really spin on vaguely fascist architecture, and some fabulous ball gowns at an EDM party co-hosted by the Catholic church. I spotted one noble lady sporting a Missoni skirt.

These are not medieval clothes. That's a hoodie.

I’m really not kidding when I say it’s a pastiche. It's such a pastiche that I almost want to think of it as a post-apocalyptic dystopia. And that ahistoricism opens up some interesting questions about the film’s message.

Most recent (that is, not medieval) Robin Hood stories are about the difference between law and justice. In the Disney Robin Hood, for example, bad King John is in charge of the law, but acts unjustly. Robin Hood and his merry men defeat injustice to support the lawful King Richard the Lionheart. In other words, Robin Hood steals from the rich to return to the poor what a just ruler never would have taken. (I’ll talk more about this Robin Hood trend in my upcoming review of the Russell Crowe Robin Hood.)

But this version of the story essentially removes the king. The military-ecclesiastical-industrial complex is the bad guy here: the sheriff is plotting with the church and the “Arabians” (?!) to continue the crusades, deplete the royal treasury, and assume “absolute control” of England. But there’s no real mention of a specific king, or any ideals of kingship. If good power is unidentifiable, then all visible power is bad, and that makes this move far more anarchic than is standard.

Evil wears a fabulous coat.

The best way for me to make sense of this movie is to situate it within a particular niche moment in pop culture politics. Director Otto Bathhurst worked on Peaky Blinders, a show which argued that the first world war left such a moral vacuum that the vacancy could only be filled with nihilistic violence. This movie also evokes the disordered chaos of Tom Hardy’s 2017 series Taboo (produced by many of the same people as Peaky Blinders), which reveled in the pure corruption of British colonialism and posited an ethos of total destruction as the only antidote.

Some of those fires were caused by Molotov cocktails.

There are also the actual politics to consider: not just Trump and Brexit (at one point the sheriff warns the people of Nottingham that the Arabs will soon invade their town if they don’t give him money to fight them), but also the anti-austerity movement in the UK and the Occupy Wall Street movement in the US.

We can think through this difference by considering how similar Robin Hood and Batman are, in general and in this film. (Jamie Dornan’s character almost follows Two-Face’s arc, for what it’s worth.) Many Batman movies position the dark hero as an antidote to corruption. But contrast Christopher Nolan’s 2012 The Dark Knight Rises, which portrays Bane (rather than a ruler/mobboss/king) as a threat to the American and global order while implicitly linking him with the Occupy movement. There, Batman restores law and order, without fully addressing the injustices that motivated Bane. Bane didn't get a chance to articulate his ideology (or if he did, we couldn't understand what he said), so it was impossible for the viewer to decide which side to take. That's the point.

A hero of our time.

This Robin Hood is more Bane than Batman, since, lacking a clear sense of responsible kingship anywhere in this pastiche medieval world, the only solution to corruption is destruction and departure. By the film’s end, Rob and most of the working class of Nottingham have moved to Sherwood Forest. They are true medieval outlaws now, not just law-breakers, but living beyond both the demands and the protections of the law.

I could argue that the politics are reactionary. That is, that there’s no solution offered, just a violent pushback against corruption. But I’m also reminded of David Graeber’s way of thinking about the Occupy movement that he helped found: it wasn’t meant to offer solution. It was meant to open the conversation about the problems.

Ultimately, the movie’s vibes make it impossible to distinguish a clear political argument, which is probably good, because who likes being preached to while watching handsome men do violence?

But the movie does put its finger on some sort of pulse, one that I think people on both the left and the right can feel beat. This movie is so historically inaccurate that it has transcended history, which suggests that the tensions it portrays—between the poor and the wealthy, the powerful and the rest of us—are universal and perpetual.

So why not keep fighting the good fight? It looks fun, and we can wear whatever we want. I look great in evil coats.

Four out of four sequels. Because this movie, which bombed at the box office, ends with a clear set up for another installment. We’ll never get it.

Current Ranking of Robin Hood Movies:

• Absolute Best: Disney Robin Hood
• Most Anarchic: Robin Hood (2018)

Josie Kafka is a full-time cat servant and part-time rogue demon hunter. (What's a rogue demon?)

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