The Northman Reviews

(Flight) Eggers gains budget and looses his grip for characters and even atmosphere. Well, Icelamnd locations are great but haunted by FX. Vengeance plot is well constructed, mystified ; visually is apparently rich...

Sound and fury for... so little. Me jaded? Nah, just reserved and circumspect. Frozen show but the beautiful Anya warms me up...

It was my turn to pick up a film for our filmclub and, as usual, I tried to go for a big gamble and went for a huge Viking epic saga, easily the most violent movie we have seen so far. Well, as far as I was concerned, I thought it was visually impressive and I really enjoyed the tense dark ominous mood. I have to admit that I was little concerned after I saw the trailer which, to be honest, didn’t really impress me as it made the whole thing look like a rather basic vengeance tale. Indeed, the biggest challenge for Robert Eggers was to turn this classic Scandinavian legend which had inspired countless other stories such as ‘Hamlet’ or even ‘The Lion King’ into something new and, if I have to be honest with myself, he didn’t really succeed. Sure, I loved the visuals and how was I completely immersed in this vintage Viking world but the whole thing was still too predictable. I have to admit that I didn’t see coming the scene when Amleth’s mother pretty much shattered his already fairly demented psychological state by revealing her true feelings about his father and even himself. However, it was probably the only surprising thing that occurred during more than 2 hours of mayhem. Still, the general madness and the bleakness of the whole endeavor was very much appreciated. Eventually, if you see the current state of our world, 1000 years later, our inclination for violence didn’t really change, the only thing which has evolved is that we don’t use such seemingly innocent axes anymore but missiles capable of wiping out a whole building. In the meantime, we still manage to fight for the most dubious reasons and we will keep doing it because that’s our tragic nature. Anyway, to conclude, even I’m still not a huge fan of Eggers’s work, I still enjoyed his Viking epic and it is definitely worth a look.