[6.6/10] The Northman is nice to look at. Director Robert Eggers and his team still know how to make a historical setting shine in its splendor, repel in its bleakness, or engross with demonic imagery. The film doubles as a tourism video for the Icelandic and Irish locales where it was shot, full of scenic beauty and stunning landscapes draped in verdant wonder or frozen stillness.
Eggers and his collaborators also still know how to shoot the hell out of film, even when they’re not awing the audience with some wide shot of a stunning vista. There are impressive unbroken shots of men and women at war, charged confrontations, and mystical experiences. Beyond that, the film is a triumph of imagery and composition, with any number of well-framed shots conveying the atmosphere and meaning of the piece better than any sorry bit of dialogue.
And the director and his company expertly evoke an appropriately epic, bloody vibe for their picture. Much of this plays like a live action Genndy Tartakovsky piece, trading on an epic quest, steeped in a particular mythos, buoyed by larger than life renditions of battle and determination. There are big choices here, in the aesthetic, in the tone, in the costuming and other design elements, that craft an impressive sense of place for the Scandinavian legend that Eggers and his fellow creatives seek to summon for their audiences.
Here’s the problem -- I don’t really care about that story. I don’t really care about the characters within it. And no matter how much exquisite texture the director packs into his fantasy-historical epic, that means I don’t really care when the quest is completed and the wrongs are righted either. The Northman is an impressively-built, intricately-carved, but ultimately empty box, and I could not, in good conscience, recommend it for its spectacle alone.
Even if you haven't read Hamet or, god help us, The Lion King, you can see where this is going. Father killed by Uncle. Young son runs off and must become big and strong so he can avenge his dad. So on and so forth. Spinning a new version of an old narrative is no sin. The story is in the telling. And Eggers and his co-writer and brother Sjón get some credit for returning the plot to its Scandinavian roots. But there’s not much there beyond a few overfamiliar tropes spruced up with a faithful rendition of cultural myths and traditions.
The biggest problem is our protagonist, Amleth, himself. He’s a largely flat character and star Alexander Skarsgård plays him like a cipher. Like so many characters here, save for a select few, he never evinces a sense of having an inner life. Instead, Amleth is just a big dumb Viking Batman, berserking in the hinterlands and avenging in the night and otherwise showing off his manly prowess with little depth or meaning beneath his crusade for revenge.
Key events in his life, from having to hide his true nature as a thought-dead prince posing as a slave, to falling in love with a Slavic sorceress, to killing those who murdered his father are surprisingly deadened and emotionally uninvolving. This is a stoic meathead playing out predictable beats with extraordinary imagery. You can marvel at the look of the thing for some time, but after a while, you realize you care about this moving painting, but not really the figures within it. The exception comes in the scene where Amleth, still posing as a slave, reveals his true nature to his mother, Gudrún, his father’s widow and the coerced wife of his uncle the usurper. Amleth’s dream is to kill his uncle Fjölnir, not just to avenge his father, but to free his mother from the chains of her forced marriage. That is the dream he has been fighting to keep alight all these years.
Only, when he figuratively unmasks himself, she reveals that it was Amleth’s father who conceived him by raping her, who forced her into marriage. And worse yet, she begged the bastard Fjölnir to kill his brother, claim his throne, and slay her firstborn to rid her of this curse. There is great power in that. Nicole Kidman nearly steals the whole movie with her taunting, upbraiding monologue, giving the best performance in the film. (Give or take Willem DaFoe gettin’ weird with it, as usual.) The twist that Amleth’s whole quest is founded on a canard, that the victim he set out to save was, in fact, the author of his misery, is the most electric turn in the narrative, one that threatens to upend the life the young man thought he was living to this point.
And then...things just go back to the usual. He keeps questing, and yeah, now he wants to kill his mom and settle down with Olga, his fellow slave and love interest as his family instead. But the movie reverts into being a hollow Norseman’s brodown, rife with animalistic roars and outsized, blood-drenched battles, but light on reasons to give a damn about the purpose and losses that are supposed to motivate them.
There is some merit to The Norseman as an elevated piece of folklore. Eggers and company’s devotion to injecting the film with every bit of Scandinavian ritual and cultural inheritance possible gives it its character. The script and the images it calls for take the spiritual elements of these old tales seriously, steeping Amleth’s trials in the auspices of fate and the demands of the gods. Scenes of spiritual family trees or valkyries carrying the dead to Valhalla or Björk-backed seeresses cajoling men to their destinies have a force and a flavor that the film’s more down-to-earth interactions lack.
All of that's not enough, though, to save a movie that's rich with texture but meager in story and character. There is merit in retelling the grand tales of old, particularly with an air towards fidelity to the historical contexts and cultural wellsprings they emerge from. Wrapping them in alternatively gritty and gorgeous cinematic finery can give them new life, using the tools of our era to bring the stories of theirs back to life. But without the heart of the tale being revived along with the corpus, without a depth to the players who compel it anew, all that's left is a noble and radiant, but long and lifeless slog.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2023-01-08T04:41:31Z
[6.6/10] The Northman is nice to look at. Director Robert Eggers and his team still know how to make a historical setting shine in its splendor, repel in its bleakness, or engross with demonic imagery. The film doubles as a tourism video for the Icelandic and Irish locales where it was shot, full of scenic beauty and stunning landscapes draped in verdant wonder or frozen stillness.
Eggers and his collaborators also still know how to shoot the hell out of film, even when they’re not awing the audience with some wide shot of a stunning vista. There are impressive unbroken shots of men and women at war, charged confrontations, and mystical experiences. Beyond that, the film is a triumph of imagery and composition, with any number of well-framed shots conveying the atmosphere and meaning of the piece better than any sorry bit of dialogue.
And the director and his company expertly evoke an appropriately epic, bloody vibe for their picture. Much of this plays like a live action Genndy Tartakovsky piece, trading on an epic quest, steeped in a particular mythos, buoyed by larger than life renditions of battle and determination. There are big choices here, in the aesthetic, in the tone, in the costuming and other design elements, that craft an impressive sense of place for the Scandinavian legend that Eggers and his fellow creatives seek to summon for their audiences.
Here’s the problem -- I don’t really care about that story. I don’t really care about the characters within it. And no matter how much exquisite texture the director packs into his fantasy-historical epic, that means I don’t really care when the quest is completed and the wrongs are righted either. The Northman is an impressively-built, intricately-carved, but ultimately empty box, and I could not, in good conscience, recommend it for its spectacle alone.
Even if you haven't read Hamet or, god help us, The Lion King, you can see where this is going. Father killed by Uncle. Young son runs off and must become big and strong so he can avenge his dad. So on and so forth. Spinning a new version of an old narrative is no sin. The story is in the telling. And Eggers and his co-writer and brother Sjón get some credit for returning the plot to its Scandinavian roots. But there’s not much there beyond a few overfamiliar tropes spruced up with a faithful rendition of cultural myths and traditions.
The biggest problem is our protagonist, Amleth, himself. He’s a largely flat character and star Alexander Skarsgård plays him like a cipher. Like so many characters here, save for a select few, he never evinces a sense of having an inner life. Instead, Amleth is just a big dumb Viking Batman, berserking in the hinterlands and avenging in the night and otherwise showing off his manly prowess with little depth or meaning beneath his crusade for revenge.
Key events in his life, from having to hide his true nature as a thought-dead prince posing as a slave, to falling in love with a Slavic sorceress, to killing those who murdered his father are surprisingly deadened and emotionally uninvolving. This is a stoic meathead playing out predictable beats with extraordinary imagery. You can marvel at the look of the thing for some time, but after a while, you realize you care about this moving painting, but not really the figures within it.
The exception comes in the scene where Amleth, still posing as a slave, reveals his true nature to his mother, Gudrún, his father’s widow and the coerced wife of his uncle the usurper. Amleth’s dream is to kill his uncle Fjölnir, not just to avenge his father, but to free his mother from the chains of her forced marriage. That is the dream he has been fighting to keep alight all these years.
Only, when he figuratively unmasks himself, she reveals that it was Amleth’s father who conceived him by raping her, who forced her into marriage. And worse yet, she begged the bastard Fjölnir to kill his brother, claim his throne, and slay her firstborn to rid her of this curse. There is great power in that. Nicole Kidman nearly steals the whole movie with her taunting, upbraiding monologue, giving the best performance in the film. (Give or take Willem DaFoe gettin’ weird with it, as usual.) The twist that Amleth’s whole quest is founded on a canard, that the victim he set out to save was, in fact, the author of his misery, is the most electric turn in the narrative, one that threatens to upend the life the young man thought he was living to this point.
And then...things just go back to the usual. He keeps questing, and yeah, now he wants to kill his mom and settle down with Olga, his fellow slave and love interest as his family instead. But the movie reverts into being a hollow Norseman’s brodown, rife with animalistic roars and outsized, blood-drenched battles, but light on reasons to give a damn about the purpose and losses that are supposed to motivate them.
There is some merit to The Norseman as an elevated piece of folklore. Eggers and company’s devotion to injecting the film with every bit of Scandinavian ritual and cultural inheritance possible gives it its character. The script and the images it calls for take the spiritual elements of these old tales seriously, steeping Amleth’s trials in the auspices of fate and the demands of the gods. Scenes of spiritual family trees or valkyries carrying the dead to Valhalla or Björk-backed seeresses cajoling men to their destinies have a force and a flavor that the film’s more down-to-earth interactions lack.
All of that's not enough, though, to save a movie that's rich with texture but meager in story and character. There is merit in retelling the grand tales of old, particularly with an air towards fidelity to the historical contexts and cultural wellsprings they emerge from. Wrapping them in alternatively gritty and gorgeous cinematic finery can give them new life, using the tools of our era to bring the stories of theirs back to life. But without the heart of the tale being revived along with the corpus, without a depth to the players who compel it anew, all that's left is a noble and radiant, but long and lifeless slog.