History, Etc

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WHY THE NETFLIX MOVIE 'THE KING' IS A PILE OF GARBAGE

WHY THE NETFLIX MOVIE 'THE KING' IS A PILE OF GARBAGE

Not my words... but probably true

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Dan Jones
Aug 10, 2023
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WHY THE NETFLIX MOVIE 'THE KING' IS A PILE OF GARBAGE
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Thanks for being part of my Substack crew. I love having you here and really appreciate your support. If you’d like to go one further, my latest book Wolves of Winter is published in the UK in two months time. You can pre-order it via Waterstones now. Pre-orders really help authors and publishers and can make the difference between a novel (or indeed a series) being a hit or disappearing into obscurity. There’s no pressure at all, but if you’d consider pre-ordering, well, I’ll love you forever.


If you know me a little, or a lot, you will be aware that I have a complicated relationship with the Netflix movie The King, which purports to tell the story of Henry V and the battle of Agincourt.

I want to like The King. I have tried to like The King. I have watched certain bits of The King at least a hundred times. I can recite by heart, and in a ludicrous French accent, the bit where The Dauphin, played by Robert Pattinson, explains to Henry V (Timothée Chalamet) that he is going to kill him and bury him under a tree.

In that sense, The King lives rent-free in my head and has done for years.

But when it comes down to it, I find that The King mostly makes me uptight and a bit sad. I think that’s because it tries to do several incompatible and unwise things at once.

I’ll try to explain what they are and why they suck.

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