Review: The Lost King
Content warning: one skeleton, and half a sword fight.
Yes, you read that right. The Lost King is a movie with a name epic enough that it will probably be a blockbuster in China despite having black people in it. I went in expecting to see chain-mail bikinis, mosh pits trying to pass as battle scenes, CGI dragons that would have been better replaced by iguanas on a LEGO-castle, ancient ruins where even the stones rotted but the torches stayed lit...You know, the kind of fun-filled fantasy history marketed at people to dumb to know the English language, and people who don’t know any language at all, but will be amused by the shiny objects, and do lots of grunt and flapping when they see how much cleavage the teenage female pope showed off during her pilgrimage to The Empire Of Mandingo…
The Lost King is not that kind of movie. The lost king contains exactly one skeleton, which just sits there in its grave. And half a sword fight. That is, it’s stage actors with wooden swords and one of them shouts “
my kingdom for a horse” which proves that Uber surge pricing was a thing longer than I thought.
So Then, What Genre is The Lost King?
First I should mention that the protagonist and author of the story, Cutie McMilfy, is a professional salesperson. Her job is to emotionally manipulate people, and we learn in the first few scenes that she is so good at emotionally manipulating people that she is worthy of a promotion. In fact, the protagonist is so angry about her manipulation skills being unnoticed that she wants to quit her job.
Got that? This is a movie written by a salesperson. What do you call a movie written by a salesperson?
An infomercial.
The Last King is an infomercial.
The rest of the movie is half about Cutie McMilfy being cute and MILFy, and half a morality tale about why you should always follow your dreams…Literally. As in, if you hallucinate a ghost, follow the ghost, because ghosts seen by hallucinating salespeople are a better source of information than any science done by scientists. And boy, are scientists a bunch of arrogant sexist jerks, doing arrogant sexist jerk things like preferring data obtained through the scientific method, when they should be believing ghosts hallucinated by salespeople.
Yes, it’s another case where yuppie liberals have total control over the narrative, and yet still come out looking like the bad guys. Because they are so deep in their bubble they can’t imagine anyone could reach different conclusions from the conclusions that yuppie liberals come to. After all, there’s only one possible reason anyone could ever disagree with yuppie liberals - being evil nazis.
Plot synopsis
There are very different stories contained within this movie, so I’m not sure how to summarize it.
Story number 1: What Actually Happened According To Wikipedia
For a long time, scientists suspected that the grave of Richard the Third Was under a certain parking lot. However, digging up parking lots is expensive, and scientists were not able to raise the funds needed to do the digging. This is because scientists are bad at emotionally manipulating people.
Salespeople, on the other hand, are very good at emotionally manipulating people. If a salesperson parachuted in from out of nowhere and did a crowdfunding campaign, they could raise enough money for the dig to proceed. And that's what happened.
Then the parachuting salesperson tried to take over and pretend that everything was her idea from the start, and when nobody believed her, she accused everybody else of parachuting in and stealing her idea, and pretending everything was their idea from the start.
The end.
Story number 2: What happened according to a salesperson (read: this is what
The Lost King wants you to believe)
A sales woman used her intuition to intuit that Richard the Third wasn’t actually a cartoonish villain, and then a ghost tells her where to find the grave. When the saleswoman tries to explain to scientists that the scientific method is inferior to ghost stories told by salespeople, the evil sexist scientists evilly say that, no, the scientific method is not inferior to ghost stories from salespeople. I know, what a bunch of sexist jerks.
Did I tell you about that time a woman intuited that airplanes would fly twice as well if you turned the wings upside down, and then those sexist flight engineers disagreed? Yeah, it’s that all over again.
Maybe women should spend less time intuiting were gravesites are, and more time using their superpowers for useful things. Let's see them try intuiting how to cure cancer and invent fusion energy and how to turn atmospheric carbon into vegetables that taste like bacon.
Because even if women’s intuition and ghost stories from salespeople actually are better than science, it I doesn’t matter if you talk about actual results. What have ghost stories actually invented? Science has transformed humanity from a few million illiterate inbred dirt farmers trading horses for kingdoms, to 8 billion members of a global super civilization that trades cryptocurrencies for drone-delivered 3d-printed designer-drugs.
(Sporks? You know, those utensils that are half spoon and half fork? Did women’s intuition invent those? I seem to remember hearing somewhere that it did.)
According to the movie, the salesperson invent the idea of placing an old map and a new map together, something that scientists have never thought of before, according to the movie.
So yeah, it turns out men never use maps, according to the movie. Maybe that’s because men aren’t to proud to ask for directions from a local who says “
you can't miss it!” Even though it actually IS possible for you to miss it. Stupid women and their stupid maps, don’t you know that maps caused papercuts? You don’t need a map, after all, since you can’t miss it.
Also, the movie involves lots of talking to ghosts, because it's
Based On A True Story. But then the movie gets to the part which actually is true: the salesperson writes one email, and that one email brings in massive wads of cash.
You see, it turns out that for a century or so there has been a huge organization dedicated to the ideas that our protagonist salesperson is pretending to have originated.
With their heads stuck in the past, none of them had heard of crowdfunding yet.
(Was the technology needed for internet crowdfunding invented by ghosts talking to intuitive saleswomen? Or was it invented by nerdy men doing science? I don’t know, because those nerds don't get mentioned, they weren’t invited to the press conference.)
Then the evil scientists hold evil press conferences where they say that they were the ones who did all the actual work, ignoring all the hard work that the salesperson put into crafting that one email.
The End.
Story number 3: I will call “truth hiding in plain sight”.
That the moral of the story is garbage would become obvious if the story protagonist was anyone other than Cutie McMilfy the saleswoman.
This story calls for an ensemble cast, you know, where you see things from other viewpoints than just one. However, it’s a BBC film, and the Big Black Crock is too woke to consider multiple viewpoints, because the concept of multiple viewpoints doesn’t make for good propaganda.
When you’re preaching to the heathens, and you tell them to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes, they’ll walk two miles and not bother to come back. When you’re preaching about how Judas sold out Jesus for a bag of silver, you don’t tell the part where Judas goes and donates the bag of silver to the local orphanage. No! That just confuses people. People are stupid, they need to be lectured consistently and mind numbingly until their minds stick to the straight and narrow path.
This is what the Tutor Dynasty did when they took power in England. Their propagandists told stories with cartoonishly evil villains, such as the previous king, who they killed with an exe to the head, and not in a woodchopping accident. This axe-magnet King, Richard the Third, was described as a talon-handed brother-killer who runs the economy so badly that at the end of his reign that the net value of his kingdom is Exactly One Horse. Though to be fair, he probably assumed the horse would come with a free saddle.
Shakespeare made a play called
Henry The Third: this time it’s personal, this time it has a cartoon villain so one dimensional that even illiterate dirt farmers can understand it. That’s Shakespeare’s excuse: he had to dumb things down because was writing for malnourished inbred illiterate dirt farmers who thought that putting belts on hats was the last word in fashion. These guys thought that wearing a stack of coffee filters around your neck made you look good. These guys were so dumb, when their explorers landed in New England, they thought they were in Virginia. I’m serious, just look at their maps!
Plus, Shakespeare's slang is so weird it’s almost like a different language. Those dirt farmers would be using every last brain cell just to understand the words. You don’t want to confuse people by talking about how inflation was gotten so bad that horses now cost one kingdom, and horseshoes cost two rivers and a creek.
But what excuse does
The Last King have for turning perfectly sensible people into cartoonishly evil villains?
What excuse does it have for treating its audience like a bunch of inbred illiterate dirt farmers?
Quote:
![](https://imgix.ranker.com/user_node_img/50103/1002045568/original/despite-85_-of-the-population-being-peasants-arthurian-legends-make-them-seem-like-a-minori-photo-u1?auto=format&q=60&fit=crop&fm=pjpg&dpr=2&w=325)
"Take that you evil scientist!" How the BBC imagines moviegoers watching The Last King
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Story Number Four: is just anther layer of stupid. You know how a good story can work on multiple levels? So can stupid stories, with all the levels being stupid.
So at the beginning of the story the protagonist salesperson is tired and grumpy all the time, and gets even more grumpy because a well-rested, young, chirpy, cheerful woman is chosen for a promotion, and Grumpy McSleepy is not promoted. Of course this is portrayed as a horrible injustice - never mind that
the movie makers themselves did not cast an actual ugly grumpy cripple to play the character, they hired a younger, chirpier, cuter and better-rested actresses who merely pretends to be tired and grumpy.
I’m certain that if you try to point out this hypocrisy to liberals 99% will just be confused. That’s why we Republicans do conspiracy theories: when you’re talking to people about economics and sociology and epistemology and climatology you lose listeners quickly. But talk about
alien reptile overlords drinking the fear-sweat of cheerleaders under the cold fluorescent lights of a pizza parlour…People listen. What, it's called "
exaggerating for effect". Gotta keep it simple, stupid.
Moral: evil people use words differently from the way salespeople use words
Our tired and grumpy protagonist goes to a play written for illiterate dirt-farmers, Richard The Third by William Shakespeare. People get stabbed and trade kingdoms for horses - basically what liberals think Wall Street is like. However, our saleswoman uses her magical female intuition to conclude that this play lacks historical accuracy. Good thing she didn’t watch a Midsummer Nights Dream, or she would have had to battle it out with zoologists to prove that Satyrs and fairies are being misrepresented in media.
She’s offended by how disabled people only get cast as villains in storytelling. In this case, Richard is hunchbacked and evil, and people who watch the play might conclude that all disabled people are evil, because that’s what storytellers seem to believe.
She ends up arguing with a man who evilly suggests that someone in the 21st century should not assume they know more than Shakespeare, someone who lived closer in time to the events he portrays. For us, Richard is ancient history. For Shakespeare, Richard was recent history.
Sounds reasonable - if centuries from now, someone retells
The Lost King, which movie do you think will be more accurate? The
2022 film about events in
2012-2015, or the
2522 film about events in
2012-2015?
Since our salesperson has lost the debate on logical grounds, she decides to play rules-lawyer, and win on a technicality. She discovers that Shakespeare wrote about Richard a century after the events, and, according to her personal definition of “
recent history”, 100 years is not “
recent”.
She used the word “
recent” according to the official definition, as officially recorded in…
nowhere. Maybe a ghost told her how recent “
recent” is.
If there’s a movie in
2122 about Putin getting shanked and trading the Crimea for a Scooby-Do Van, and then a
2622 movie about the same thing, I would believe the
2122 one, regardless of whether salespeople define that as “
recent history” or not.
So anyway, then ghost shows up, the saleswoman manipulates people into giving lots of money, including a donation from her ex-husband, who she suddenly gets back together with….A ghost tells me that she's a gold digging whore, but I don’t listen to ghosts, and anyway I’ve got nothing against gold digging whores, some of my best friends are gold digging whores.
Oh yes, the protagonist does say “
so what you’re saying is” at the climactic moment.
Quote:
![](https://img2.rule34.us/images/21/eb/21ebd2d42bbb6fd3bb3d67ad3dba2cad.jpeg)
Cutie McMilfy, after slaying the autistic scientist with her +5 Sword Of So-What-You're-Saying-Is. In the Yuppie bubble SWYSI is what the A-bomb was to WW2, or what a folding chair is to a WWE match.
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You see, there’s a argument between two factions:
the Tudors, and
the Richardians. The Tudors say that Richard was a bad king and a hunchback.
The Richardians say that Richard was a good king with a straight back.
When the
skeleton turns out to have a hunchback, that’s
one point scored for the Tudors. The Tudors gain credibility, and the Richardians lose credibility. But the skeleton is just physical scientific evidence, and you already know how this movie feels about people who prefer to believe physical scientific evidence.
‘’
So what you’re saying is that all hunchbacks are evil, is that what you’re saying? Is that what you’re saying?”
When it turns out that no, that’s not what he’s saying, she goes into lawyer mode and points out that doctors in 2022 don’t use the word “
hunchback”, which means that Richard the 3rd isn’t actually a hunchback! If the Tudors were truthful, they would have accused Richard of having “
spinal curvature”!
So the autistic nerd is defeated and sent home to have his nightly crywank, and every actual human lives happily ever after.
Verdict: Three Thumbs Down.
Yes,
it’s 99% Christianity, but that just means it’s
Well Disguised Satanism.
Saying that scientists are evil because they don’t believe in ghosts and magical intuition....Isn't that Christianity? Shouldn’t I be celebrating this movie? Perhaps I should, just like I should be celebrating the rise of Islamism, and the rise of foreign autocracies, which are a more biblical form of government.
But I don’t, because these are my rivals. Every now and then I get optimistic and think True Christian can join forces with our fellow anti-scientific, anti-democratic ideologies, seeing as we agree on 99% of things.
But that last 1% matters. And while anyone can spot a Satanist that has “
666” tattoos and rusty safety-pins for eye-ball piercings, these 99% Christian 1% Satanists can sneak around, causing God to be 100% offended.