Surely We Can Do Better Than 'The Pendragon Cycle'. Right?

Why is The Daily Wire seemingly incapable of making a good narrative film?

Last week, armed with a free 6 month subscription to Daily Wire+ courtesy of Matt Fradd, I sat down to watch The Pendragon Cycle: Rise of the Merlin, with the aim of reviewing it for you, our gracious readers. Daily Wire had been hyping this show for years at this point, and it was clear from the trailers that they had put serious money into the production design of this series. This would be their Lord of the Rings, a big-budget fantasy show intended to compete with Hollywood while aiming to capture the under-served Middle American family audience.

Unfortunately, the show is bad. Occasionally just mediocre, sometimes atrociously bad. I could not watch the whole first episode in one sitting; I came back later to finish the episode so I could write a credible and coherent review, but I did not watch any of the remaining six episodes, so this is not a review of the entire season. The first episode unfortunately bears many of the hallmarks of bad Christian projects: bad writing, bad direction, bad lighting, occasional preachy moments leaving nothing to subtext, and a confidence that its audience will overlook the film-making shortcuts it took because they approve of “the message”. Episode 1 is mostly set in pre-Christian Britain (and Atlantis, for some reason), so I hoped it would avoid the real Evangelical preachy moments, but unfortunately a short scene with a couple of monks filled me with dread that the more Christianity appeared in the show, the more like an altar call it would become.

The stories of Merlin and Atlantis (and, for that matter, Christ) are titanic, mythic, unfathomably deep; though Pendragon attempts to hint at that depth, it doesn’t have the time, budget, or patience to deliver. I have not read the books, but from what I understand this mythic quality does come across in that medium; perhaps they are unadaptable to television, a medium which by its very nature involves compression, simplification, and compromise. It is clear that the Daily Wire poured a lot of money into the production design of the show, trying to imitate the Lord of the Rings trilogy by world-building through environment. This is admirable, and shows decent instincts on their part. However, Lord of the Rings succeeded because it was brilliantly written and directed as well as well-designed and thoughtfully constructed visually. It had a horror movie grit to it, a dark edge which Pendragon desperately tries to conjure but misses, all the way down to its way-too-crisp digital cinematography.¹ It’s an ambitious misfire, but a misfire nonetheless.

Finally, we come to my biggest problem with the show: it is very sexual for a show aimed at conservative Christian families. I don’t mean that there is a full-on sex scene hidden somewhere in Episode One, but I do think the costume design is shockingly immodest in many scenes and there are situations that I as a parent would hesitate to show my kids. The women wear necklines that plunge to their belly buttons (I wish I was exaggerating), and in the Atlantis bull-fighting scene (just go with it) Charis wears an outfit which covers little more than a bikini. It flies up when she runs, clearly exposing her posterior. In one scene, Charis rises from swimming in a lake when confronted by Taliessin, and you can clearly see her entire body through her soaking wet, sheer, white dress. I have always suspected Jeremy Boreing of being a little more open to gratuitous sexuality than a Christian should be (see his Jeremy’s razors commercials), but I was shocked to see how far he was willing to take it in what is ostensibly a family show. My parents certainly wouldn’t have let me see this show when I was a teen, and I think they would have been right not to. This is the sort of show that conservative parents would like to be able to put on and not have to reach for the remote every few minutes; if they can’t have that sort of peace of mind, then why do we even need a conservative media company in the first place?²

Unfortunately The Pendragon Cycle, like almost all the movies and shows that Daily Wire has put out that were not the brainchild of Matt Walsh, is ultimately not a very good show. I try my best to highlight good Christian film-making on this site and not endlessly harp on all the bad examples, but the next year or so looks incredibly bleak. Angel Studios has had a decent run lately, maybe their next project will be….

….oh. Well, maybe the wider Christian film industry will surprise me….

….oh.

Stay tuned, stay hyped, and thanks for all the support.

1. My wife said she could see the make-up lines on Charis’ face. I strongly contend that in our thirst for the newest, most crisp, most technologically advanced shooting tech for our 8k TVs, we’re forgetting that film-making is inherently a magic trick, and the closer and more hi-def of a look we get at it, the less it works. This is a problem plaguing all of modern Hollywood, not just Pendragon, but Pendragon is an egregious example in some places.

2. To avoid accusations of prudishness and hypocrisy I feel that I must point out my aversion here is due to the intended audience (conservative families) and the feeling that this sexuality was completely unnecessary to the story being told. There is no narrative reason to have the characters dressed this way (except, perhaps, for the bullfight; but even that could have been done a little more tastefully). We have recommended films on this site which deal much more explicitly with sexual themes, but firstly they are clearly intended for adults, not family audiences, and secondly actually explore those themes and come to interesting moral conclusions, rather than use costuming as window dressing or eye candy.