If Elon Musk Is Down for a Historically Accurate Epic, Mel Gibson Should Direct the True Story of King Arthur II.
Elon Musk recently replied “I’m down” to a proposal that he fund Mel Gibson to direct a painstakingly authentic adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey—complete with period ships, armour, Homeric Greek dialogue and casting free of modern revisionism. That exchange, coming amid Musk’s sharp criticism of Christopher Nolan’s big-budget Odyssey, has opened a door. If the goal is cinema that prioritises fidelity to source material over contemporary fashion, there is a far more ambitious, more startling, and potentially more commercially explosive project waiting: a trilogy based on the research of Welsh historians Alan Wilson and Baram Blackett into the life of King Arthur II.
According to Alan Wilson and Baram Blackett, there were two distinct historical kings named Arthur, separated by roughly 150 years. The later figure—Arthur II (Athrwys ap Meurig), born around AD 503 and active in the sixth century—emerges from their reading of early Welsh genealogies, charters and chronicles as a real war-leader who fought a series of decisive campaigns across Britain.
King Arthur I (late 4th century) is associated with the period of Magnus Maximus. He fought the Romans (and in their account achieved significant successes against them).
Their reconstruction, detailed across multiple books including King Arthur, II King of Glamorgan and Gwent and The Holy Kingdom, presents a narrative of national unification, cosmic catastrophe and transatlantic adventure that dwarfs the usual Arthurian cycle of romance and betrayal.
They argue that later medieval writers and chroniclers conflated the two separate historical figures into the single legendary King Arthur of romance. But in Wilson and Blackett’s own framework, Arthur I and Arthur II were real, successive, and distinct rulers, not a single person or a vague amalgam from the start.
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| Baram Blackett - Alan Wilson and Richard D Hall |
Act One: The Twelve Battles and the Making of a Kingdom.
The first film would follow the young Arthur as he wages the twelve famous battles recorded in early sources such as the Historia Brittonum. Campaign by campaign he consolidates power across the island, defeating rivals and invaders until Britain is brought under a single crown—the “Great Kingdom” that, in this telling, forms the foundation of the later realm. Gibson’s gift for visceral, large-scale combat sequences (Braveheart, Apocalypto) and his insistence on linguistic and material authenticity would turn these battles into a relentless, geographically sweeping military epic. The result could feel less like fantasy and more like a sixth-century Saving Private Ryan set against the hills, rivers and Roman roads of post-Roman Britain.
Act Two: Asteroid Debris and the Onset of the Dark Ages.
The second instalment would depict the abrupt destruction of that hard-won kingdom by asteroid debris. In Wilson and Blackett’s account, the impact plunges the island into a prolonged climatic catastrophe in which nothing grows for seven to eleven years—ushering in the historical Dark Ages. The visual and dramatic possibilities are immense: skies darkened by dust, failed harvests, societal collapse, and a once-unified realm reduced to survival. Gibson has already shown he can film human endurance under extreme conditions; here the enemy is not merely other men but the sky itself.
Act Three: The Voyage to America and the Spear in Kentucky.
The final film would follow Arthur and his remaining forces as they take to the sea in some 700 ships, cross the Atlantic, sail up the Mississippi and establish a camp in what is now Kentucky. There they wage war against the indigenous peoples of the region. After a long day of fighting, Arthur is said to have removed his armour only to be assassinated by a ten-year-old Native American boy who slipped through the camp’s defences and drove a spear into his heart. The body, according to the researchers, was embalmed and eventually returned to Wales for burial.
This sequence alone—ocean crossing, riverine expedition, cultural collision, and a sudden, almost intimate death—offers the kind of tragic grandeur rarely attempted in modern historical cinema. With Gibson’s proven ability to stage both vast set-pieces and intimate violence, the climax could land with the force of the final moments of The Passion of the Christ.
Proponents of the Wilson-Blackett reconstruction argue that such a trilogy would possess a scale, originality and emotional range capable of surpassing even the opening-weekend numbers of Nolan’s Odyssey. They further contend that a director of Gibson’s intensity and track record with difficult, faith-inflected or culturally specific material could deliver performances and craftsmanship strong enough to contend for major awards, including Oscars. Whether those commercial and critical outcomes would materialise is, of course, unknowable; Hollywood has never been short of ambitious historical claims that failed to find an audience. Yet the sheer strangeness and sweep of the story—if executed with the same uncompromising physicality Gibson brought to Apocalypto—would at least guarantee that audiences had never seen anything quite like it.
Wilson and Blackett’s wider body of work supplies further connective tissue for anyone interested in “historically accurate” ancient narratives. They have argued that the Odyssey itself preserves a memory of a genuine world circumnavigation, that Homer drew upon an older Egyptian tradition, and that the figure of Odysseus corresponds to the Hyksos king Tefnakhte. Separately, and of particular relevance to Gibson’s filmography, they maintain that Jesus survived the crucifixion, travelled with members of his family to South Wales, and was later remembered there as the Lame Fisher King. Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ already demonstrated his willingness to treat sacred history with unflinching literalism; the idea of extending that approach to a post-crucifixion British chapter would be characteristically bold.
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| Posted by Monika Escobar |
These interpretations remain highly controversial. Mainstream historians regard Wilson and Blackett’s readings of inscriptions, genealogies and place-names as speculative or erroneous, and no conventional academic consensus supports Arthur’s death in Kentucky, an asteroid-triggered Dark Age timed precisely to his reign, or the identification of Odysseus with Tefnakhte. The theories belong firmly to the realm of alternative history.
Yet the same could be said, from certain scholarly perspectives, of any attempt to film a “historically accurate” Odyssey. Myth, legend and sparse early sources leave wide room for interpretation. If Musk’s interest in Gibson’s Odyssey rests on a desire for fidelity to original texts and a rejection of present-day ideological overlays, then the Wilson-Blackett Arthur cycle offers an even more radical test of that principle: a narrative that challenges not only Hollywood convention but the received map of early medieval history itself.
Whether such a project would “change history forever” is beyond any producer’s power to guarantee. What it could do is put on screen a version of the Arthurian story that almost no one has seen—violent, catastrophic, transoceanic and ultimately tragic—and do so under the direction of a filmmaker who has repeatedly shown he is willing to risk everything for the story he believes is true.
If Elon Musk is genuinely down for that kind of cinema, Mel Gibson and the research of Alan Wilson and Baram Blackett may represent the most ambitious, and most unexpected, next step.
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