Review here: http://www.jamesbowman.net/reviewDetail.asp?pubID=2040:
By the time you get to the end of the movie’s 140 minutes, you realize it is just another progressive fable. Robin turns out to be the son of the guy, a stonemason, who wrote the Magna Carta — here represented as a 19th century rationalist’s design for a perfect political system — a generation before the barons, with the indispensable help of Robin, sought to impose it on King John. Robin adopts as his own Sir Walter’s meaningless but curiously utopian-sounding motto: “Rise and rise again until lambs become lions” and the defeat of the French is followed by a retreat to the Greenwood where, on Marion’s account of it, there is “no rich no poor, but fair shares for all at nature’s table.” There is also an allusion to Peter Pan and the lost boys with Marion in the role of Wendy and Robin that of Peter. We’re home once again, folks, back in Movieland. I’m not quite sure how that’s happened, but somehow, that’s the only place today’s audiences ever want to be.
