The King

David Michôd wrote the script with Joel Edgerton from both parts of Shakespeare’s Henry IV and from Henry V, then threw out nearly all the language. Michôd says the one thing that daunted him was the speech before Agincourt; he found thematic ways around matching Shakespeare, so the St Crispin’s Day address is gone. Falstaff is rebuilt too: Edgerton plays him not as the old tavern companion of the plays but as the soldier who plans the campaign’s tactics, and he dies at Agincourt, though in the plays he never reaches France. This Australian and American co-production shot the battle in two weeks in a Hungarian field with 300 men and 80 horses. The heat baked the mud dry, so the crew soaked the ground, ran horses over it, and when it was ruined moved the set sideways and started over. The two armies end up indistinguishable. Christophe Gilliot, who runs the Agincourt battlefield museum, said the film sullied the image of the French and called himself outraged. A good fit if you want the indoor manufacture of a pretext for war to take as much room as the fighting, and a battle staged as mud rather than glory. Not for viewers who come for the language of the plays: the speeches are rewritten and Falstaff’s fate is changed.