Liked the first half, disliked the second half. The alterations to the original story were in some ways intriguing, like including the story of St. Winifred whose fate echoes Gawain's, but in other cases, went too far off the rails. Some of the wild ideas that got included to pad the film out to 130 long minutes should have been excised.
What is the green knight? Death, the green of the earth that will cover us all, the moss that will grow over our edifices when we're gone - I loved this interpretation. Facing the prospect of death with honor, resisting temptation - the basis for the original story may sound rather old-fashioned, but it's from the 14th century after all. Too many of the embellishments David Lowery made to the story - subplots, characters, hallucinations, etc - detracted from it, feeling at best inelegant and at worst pretentious. You certainly don't get the impression from the film that the story is about virtue or honor, and that's a shame. It started feeling like ambiguity for ambiguity's sake, which was irritating by the time the film ended.
The cinematography certainly had its moments, but I prefer less CGI, less darkness, and a more realistic look even to fantasy stories, at least as much as possible. Aesthetically I had a very mixed reaction, and in any event, the lighthearted tone of the poem was completely lost here. Dev Patel is wonderful though.
