Cinema of Swords
A Popular Guide to Movies about Knights, Pirates, Samurai, and Vikings (And Barbarians, Musketeers, Gladiators, and Outlaw Heroes)
By Lawrence Ellsworth
Welcome to the Cinema of Swords Substack! This series is a companion and expansion to the Cinema of Swords hardcover (Applause Books, 2023), which collects over 400 tasty mini-reviews of screen swashbucklers from the Silent Era through The Princess Bride.
This Substack builds on that foundation, continuing forward with reviews of swordplay movies and TV shows from the ‘90s to the present. Every week I’ll present two to four illustrated reviews on a common theme written both to inform and to entertain.
If you enjoyed the contents of the book, this weekly series will give you plenty more of the same. (And if you haven’t seen the book, look for it wherever you do your book shopping!)
Xena Gets Weird (In the Best Possible Way)
Xena: Warrior Princess was the best heroic fantasy on the screen in the late ‘90s specifically because it was ambitious; it aimed higher than was reasonable, but had enough skill and sheer enthusiasm that it often hit a target nearly as high as it was aiming for. The bond between the very different protagonists of Xena and Gabrielle, the range and onscreen chemistry of their actors, Lucy Lawless and Renee O’Connor, and their apparent willingness to try just about anything, enabled leaps of imagination in stories and settings unthinkable in more conventional series. The best episodes from the third and fourth seasons of Xena hold up extremely well almost 30 years later, easily outclassing their contemporary rivals such as DragonHeart (1996) and the Merlin miniseries (1998), despite those productions’ much larger budgets. Moreover, Xena set up the New Zealand shooting and production environment that Peter Jackson would employ so successfully for his Lord of the Rings trilogy, which kickstarted the 21st century fantasy film boom that we’re still enjoying today.
Xena: Warrior Princess, Season 3
Rating: *****
Origin: USA, 1997
Director: Oley Sassone, et al.
Source: Universal DVDs
To this reviewer’s eyes, it looks like Xena season three is where the showrunners realized that, given the series’ flexible tone, adaptable ensemble cast, and mythical setting, they were capable of telling any kind of story imaginable, and set out to do just that. The series’ lead characters Xena (Lucy Lawless) and Gabrielle (Renee O’Connor) had fallen hard for each other during season two, but their relationship was based on each idealizing the other, and in season three the pair come to grips with their real, complicated selves, who are far from ideal.
And when you’re the playthings of malicious gods, the struggle is all the more difficult and even deadly. Over the space of eight core episodes, delivered across the season in four pairs, Xena and Gabrielle are torn apart physically and emotionally, killed and reborn, and eventually put back together again by the strength of their mutual devotion, before the season ends on a gut-wrenching cliffhanger. Also playing their parts in this are recurring characters Ares the god of war (Kevin Smith), Callisto the anti-Xena (Hudson Leick), the callous Julius Caesar (Karl Urban), comic sidekick Joxer (Ted Raimi), and Autolycus the king of thieves (Bruce Campbell). The core episodes involve traumatic events: birth, death, betrayal, revenge, and raw hatred, but the top-notch writing, often by Stephen Sears and/or R.J. Stewart, finds ways to balance this trauma with comedy, romance, and redemption.
Along the way we learn where Xena learned her signature wuxia/kung fu combat moves (China, duh), and there’s even a hallucinogenic psychodrama episode constructed as a Broadway musical, complete with show tunes. Somehow, it all works. Furthermore, the quality of this season’s 22 episodes isn’t confined to those eight core episodes, they’re nearly all adventures worth watching. Usually when I review a TV season I call out a handful of top episodes and recommend you seek out those, but in the case of Xena season three, I’m instead going to list a mere handful of weak episodes to avoid: #9 (“Warrior… Priestess… Tramp”), 10 (“The Quill is Mightier…”), and 18 (“Fins, Femmes, & Gems”). Watch the rest, and the sooner the better.
Xena: Warrior Princess, Season 4
Rating: ****
Origin: USA, 1998
Director: T.J. Scott, et al.
Source: Universal DVDs
Like the previous one, Xena Season Four aspires to a structured story arc, and mostly it succeeds, though it takes a while to get good in the process. At the beginning of the season, Xena (Lucy Lawless) has a future vision of the death of herself and Gabrielle (Renee O’Connor), and most of the more serious episodes that follow are concerned with moving toward resolving that vision. There’s a new recurring villain drawn from the nigh-endless depths of Xena’s backstory, a reincarnating shaman named Alti (Claire Stansfield), but she’s a one-note menace who’s bad just because she’s bad and who quickly wears out her welcome. More interesting are the recurring Roman generals Pompey the Magnus (Jeremy Callaghan), Julius Caesar (Karl Urban, excellent), and his dupe Brutus (David Franklin).
In this season Renee O’Connor as Gabrielle really comes into her own, her screen presence and sheer appeal broadening and deepening until her charisma almost matches that of Lucy Lawless, as she adopts the Way of Love as a counterpart to Xena’s Way of the Warrior. Unfortunately, the stories often don’t do her character any favors, as she’s repeatedly suckered by good-seeming saints and prophets who are actually villainous hypocrites—heck, one such phony saint even suckers her twice. Come on!
Seeking Gabrielle’s alternative to Xena’s warrior ways takes the pair in mid-season to four episodes set in India, but what could have been an insightful journey into the culture of the subcontinent instead mostly recycles hoary old pulp-story clichés dating back to the Raj. The last of these episodes, “The Way” (#16), in which Xena briefly assumes the form and attributes of the goddess Kali, plays so fast and loose with Hindu religion that it was deemed offensive by the faithful and remained unaired until fan outcry demanded it. But you need to know that, though it may be culturally insensitive, “The Way” is nonetheless one of the tightest and most entertaining episodes in the entire series, and if you’re a Xena fan you must see it.
The rest of the season is the typical admixture of powerful dramatic episodes interleaved with weak comedy outings, some of which repeat the previous seasons’ trick of breaking the fourth wall. Strong episodes that shouldn’t be missed start with #5, “A Good Day,” the first of the Roman stories, and continue with #7, “Locked Up and Tied Down,” a hard-hitting prison tale, then #11, “Daughter of Pomira,” one more sin-atonement flashback (but a good one). There is one good comedy episode, #19, “Takes One to Know One,” a sharply written locked-room mystery featuring the ever-delightful Bruce Campbell as the King of Thieves. Everything wraps up with two stellar episodes, 20 and 21, that pay off on the death-vision plot that’s been unreeling since the beginning, with #21, “The Ides of March,” effectively completing Xena and Gabrielle’s four-season story arc. Which also, not so incidentally, paints the showrunners into a corner of their own devising—but that’s a problem for Season Five.
Next Week: Those Frenchies Seek Him Everywhere—Sink me, it’s the return of the Scarlet Pimpernel! Don’t miss it.
About Lawrence Ellsworth
Lawrence Ellsworth is the historical fiction nom de plume of Lawrence Schick, author of The Rose Knight’s Crucifixion and editor of The Big Book of Swashbuckling Adventure. See my website at swashbucklingadventure.net.
My current ongoing project is compiling and translating new, contemporary editions of all the books in Alexandre Dumas’s Musketeers Cycle, a series that when complete will fill nine volumes. Book 8, Shadow of the Bastille, is currently being published in serial form on the Substack platform, and Book 9, The Man in the Iron Mask, is forthcoming. Check out the series at musketeerscycle.substack.com.
As Lawrence Schick, I’m a writer and game designer primarily associated with narrative or role-playing games, a career I’ve pursued for over forty years, starting in the late 1970s working for Dungeons & Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax, moving into video games in the ‘80s and then online role-playing games in the ‘90s. I was lead writer and “loremaster” for The Elder Scrolls Online for over nine years, and most recently I returned to D&D as Principal Narrative Designer for Larian Studios’ smash hit Baldur’s Gate 3.
Copyright © 2024 Lawrence Schick. All rights reserved.
We'll get to see Paris Jefferson as the worshipful Athena in season 5 and a few times beyond. She makes the later seasons worthwhile in my view, as Xena's character gets more over the top (along with Gabrielle) and the melodrama becomes monotonous. I really mostly detest season-long story arcs that never seem to pan out. Easy, lazy writing, IMHO, where you just spin your wheels for an hour. characters bicker pointlessly, and you never need to think too hard about a resolution. Give me a one-hour anthology or stand-alone episode series with tight plotting any day.