A feverish dream in chrome armor. This is perhaps the most concise and accurate definition of John Boorman's Excalibur, a work that, more than forty years after its release, still pulsates with a primordial and hallucinatory energy, resistant to any attempt at easy categorization. It is not a historical film, nor is it fantasy in the Tolkienian sense that Peter Jackson would later codify. Rather, it is a visual poem, an opera steeped in blood and mud, a chromatic riot that blends the brutality of Kurosawa on acid with the pictorial ecstasy of the Pre-Raphaelites. Boorman does not stage the Arthurian legend; he evokes it, unleashes it, like a spell cast in a forgotten language.

To understand the almost insane audacity of the project, one must look to its creator. John Boorman, fresh from the metaphysical and lysergic trip of Zardoz (1974) – a film with which Excalibur shares a bold aesthetic and a fascination with myth as the driving force of the human psyche – approaches Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur not with the philological respect of a scholar, but with the visionary fervor of a bard. He compresses a vast narrative corpus, spanning generations, into two hours and twenty minutes of elliptical and feverish storytelling, a montage of archetypes that follow one another with the inevitable logic of a Greek tragedy. The result is a film that at times may seem rushed, almost hasty in jumping from one epochal event to another, but this is a deliberate choice. Boorman is not interested in the verisimilitude of chronology, but in the telluric impact of the archetype: the birth of the king, the betrayal of the friend, incestuous seduction, the search for the sacred, the fall of the kingdom. Each scene is a picture in itself, a distillation of pure myth.

The film opens and closes in water and fog, elements that define its dreamy, amphibious ontology, a world suspended between reality and elsewhere. And then there is the green. An unnatural, almost radioactive emerald green that permeates every frame. It is the green of the primeval forest, of pagan magic, of fertility and putrescence. A green that recalls certain medieval miniatures and at the same time heralds the aesthetics of a certain more auteur fantasy cinema, as if Guillermo del Toro's Pan had wandered through the forests of Camelot. This visual universe is supported by a soundtrack that is anything but discreet. Boorman plunders Wagner and Carl Orff (“O Fortuna” from Carmina Burana, not yet overused in advertising at the time), and he does so with magnificent shamelessness. The use of “Siegfried's Funeral March” from Götterdämmerung is not a simple accompaniment, it is a declaration of intent: this is not the story of an English king, it is the twilight of the gods, the end of a mythological era.

At the center of this world in transition moves the most fascinating and complex figure in the film: Merlin, played by a histrionic, eccentric, at times ridiculous and immediately terrifying Nicol Williamson. He is not a wise mentor like Gandalf. He is a liminal creature, a trickster who already belongs to the past, a repository of the “Breath of the Dragon,” the magic of the Earth that is about to be supplanted by Christian monotheism. His struggle is not so much against Mordred or the forces of evil as against time itself and the “boredom” of the human world, which forgets and moves on. His relationship with Morgana (a young and magnetic Helen Mirren, who senses power not as witchcraft but as forbidden knowledge) is the true philosophical heart of the film. She learns from him the “Charm of Doing,” the spell that transforms the world, and then uses it against him and against Arthur's new patriarchal order. Their final, chilling encounter, with Merlin trapped in crystal by his own magic, is a powerful metaphor for knowledge that petrifies into dogma, for magic that, once understood and systematized, dies.

Excalibur is a deeply Freudian film, almost Jungian in its insistence on archetypes. The sword is the phallic symbol par excellence, extracted from the rock (Mother Earth) to fertilize the kingdom. Its breaking coincides with the impotence of the king and the sterility of the earth (“The king and the earth are one”). The quest for the Grail then becomes a desperate sublimation, an attempt to restore order through a symbol of spiritual purity which is, in turn, an allegory of the female womb. The entire narrative is a tangle of primal drives: Uther's deception in sleeping with Igrayne is the original sin that taints Arthur's birth; the adulterous love between Lancelot and Guinevere is the incurable wound in the heart of the kingdom; the incest between Arthur and his half-sister Morgana begets Mordred, the agent of chaos, the golden-armored son-nemesis who is nothing more than the return of the repressed, the sin of the father who returns to destroy him. The final battle, between a dying Arthur and a ghostly Mordred, shrouded in an orange mist of nuclear sunset, is not a clash between good and evil, but a kind of cosmic annihilation, an Ouroboros of violence biting its own tail.

Of course, seen through the eyes of the 21st century, Excalibur can seem clumsy at times. The acting is deliberately theatrical, almost Brechtian in its emphasis. The dialogues have a solemnity that borders on unintentional ridicule (“It is destiny!”). Yet these supposed flaws are an integral part of its power. The film does not aspire to psychological realism, but to epic grandeur. The armor, heavy and almost impossible for the actors (including future stars such as Liam Neeson and Gabriel Byrne) to wear, is not costume, but symbolic shells, metallic idols imprisoning fragile, desiring bodies.

The violence is brutal, sudden, devoid of any heroic choreography: swords sinking into flesh with a dull thud, blood splattering on immaculate armor. It is a world of dazzling beauty and unbearable cruelty, like an illuminated page on which someone has spilled fresh blood. Excalibur occupies a fascinating limbo in the history of cinema.

It is too carnal and violent to be a family fantasy, but too sincere and romantic to be a cynical or deconstructionist work. It predates the “grimdark” of Game of Thrones by decades, but anticipates its mixture of sex, power, and violence, while always maintaining a lyrical and tragic gaze, never nihilistic. Unlike Peter Jackson's almost documentary-like and textual approach to The Lord of the Rings, which translates Tolkien's prose into majestic but fundamentally narrative cinema, Boorman translates Malory's poetry into purely visionary cinema. If Jackson builds a world, Boorman unleashes a collective hallucination. It is a work that does not ask to be understood rationally, but felt on a visceral level. It is the clang of metal, the taste of blood, the smell of fog. It is an imperfect, excessive, unbalanced film and absolutely, undeniably, a masterpiece. A dream from which, even today, it is wonderfully difficult to wake up.