Robin Hood: The Americanized Version

Max Fricks

History 223

11-11-19

Robin Hood:

The Americanized Version

            Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves a 12th-century setting, was a movie that while good was a little distracting at times. While it seems obvious to think a movie with both Kevin Costner and Morgan Freeman would be great, it didn’t quite live up to that standard for me. For starters, the lack of accents used by the actors portraying English roles. Such as Kevin Costner,  was supposed to be Robin Hood and he didn’t change his voice one bit. It was like watching him play a mix of his role as Robin Hood and his role from the Bodyguard. It was quite distracting because everyone else at least tried a little bit of an accent. Then, Morgan Freeman's role being a man from the Middle East was not so hot either and felt at times he was slipping back into his normal voice from time to time. Other than that, the action, connection to the Middle Ages, and the accuracy of the time period was pretty good.

            The action while at times was a little out there with the Robin Hood being Roland like, with being able to take so many of his enemies out single handily. This movie did a decent job of not just making this a complete fantasy movie about the Middle Ages though. Such as with the armor and shields in the movie. Starting with the armor none of which looked that stereotypical heavy brute armor that many thinks of. In this film, it was portrayed of several links of the iron rings connected. Now going into the shields, the shields in this film was made mostly of what looked like to be wood. Going into further accuracies of this movie another interesting aspect to look at was the common people's lifestyle. Example being of people was Robin Hood was bathing and shown a sign of some hygiene and cleanliness. That many don’t think about when talking about the Middle Ages. Their houses, for example, had the thatched roof and the upper-class people such as Maid Marion had the stain glass windows in her housing. The use of stain glass was also seen in the cathedral in the film as well. Another point to bring out talking of the cathedrals was the use of relics. Several times around the cathedral the use of crosses and even special gems and jewels on the swords of the higher off, such as the Sheriff of Nottingham.

            Now, of course, this is good ole Hollywood production so of course with a Middle Ages setting it's going to have inaccuracies. The vernacular was little off with some of the slang they were trying to use. Such as the terms bollocks and rubbish that were both used a few times in this movie weren’t coined until some 600 hundred plus years after the supposed setting of this movie. Then, of course, another big inaccuracy was the witch type fortune teller that had her fortune teller powers. Also, towards the end was almost immortal even after Morgan Freeman's character ran the spear through her. She was still able to keep moving until finally a dramatic moment of a sword being thrown into her. Another thing I found interesting was the ease of swinging the swords around in the movie. These swords didn’t seem to be three pounds or better they were being used as if they were much lighter. Of course, that was probably for more action-packed scenes for the entertainment of the movie. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves was something that did not have great movie reviews when it first came out, but while I can’t help to agree in some ways with the poor reviews other aspects I liked within the film.