"The Northman" is very impressive, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's especially good. It's visceral. It may be very very historically accurate, by today's lights. The battle choreography is estimable, shot in long takes with little editing. A number of excellent actors do a lot of really fine work in the parts that have words. The vistas are dark, suggestive, beautifully filmed. It has all that in its favor.
"The Northman" is also Very Serious. It is Very Very Serious. It's SO VERY Serious. There is not a moment of levity or self-awareness anywhere, ever. By the time someone in our audience finally giggled, because you have to sooner or later, it's all so completely preposterous, we all fell deathly silent. Was this the moment when the mood would be finally, ruinously broken? And it wasn't, though it was close - there really is too much about this that works to let it all fall apart completely.
In that moment, though, I realized that I had been willing myself to stay locked in for a while, trying to ignore the fact that this movie had derailed long since, about when it went from being a low-tech muddy "Dune" kind of thing and went over into "Hannibal" territory. In other words, I had been doing the hard disruptive work of pretending that this was Serious, Quality Stuff. But no, people, no. That's the movie's job, not mine. The movie should be giving me a terrific and unexpected ride, not asking me to push it uphill. If I have to sit there and hope that it doesn't shatter completely into pieces, it's already a loss. I'm not here to eat my spinach because it's good for me. I want to watch someone's brilliant work, not sustain it.
When we eventually reached the final showdown, in which two naked men scream incoherently and batter one another with swords and shields on the shadowy fiery skirts of an active flowing volcano, I was long past caring. My personal movie had ended an easy 20 minutes earlier. I'm not kidding about screaming incoherently either - there is no dialogue. It just goes, "AAAAAHHHH!" smash "RRYYAAARGH!" smash "WRRRHYYOOOOGHHHH!" smash, for like ten minutes. Or maybe it's five. Or three. Whatever. I thought it would never end.
There really is a lot of good stuff that works in "The Northman," and maybe one day when I'm home with a good beverage and a comfy chair I'll watch some of it again to look at Robert Eggers' layouts and some of the marvelous and unexpected performances. Maybe. Until then, what the movie mostly did was remind me, over and over and over again, just how amazing "The Green Knight" really was.
It took me a little while to get into it, but by its conclusion 'The Northman' had fully entertained me. Great film!
First and foremost, I'm delighted that I did indeed enjoy this film as my only previous experience of director Robert Eggers was the - in my opinion, and apparently my opinion only! - severely unsatisfying 'The Lighthouse'. It's unmistakable that this 2022 flick is made by the same person, but happily the outcome is far greater.
The cast are top notch. Alexander Skarsgård and Anya Taylor-Joy are the two standouts, the latter of which is doing big things lately; she is excellent in the most recent season of television show 'Peaky Blinders', fwiw. Claes Bang, Ethan Hawke and Nicole Kidman are all very good. Willem Dafoe too, naturally.
The story is super absorbing, even early on when I was a tad unsure I was still very invested in what was happening onscreen. The dialogue is a big reason for that, as is the thumping score. At times it can feel like it might become too talky and full of itself in regards to its own mythology and all that, though thankfully it never strays into those realms. It also delivers plenty of action, alongside some good ol' violence as well - the ending is quality in that regard, among other reasons too.
Go watch!
I'm left flabbergasted as to why Reddit recommended this as a must-watch. They're usually slightly more discerning than the average brain-off popcorn-stuffing movie watcher. This film was ok, but not great. I was torn between 6 or 7 as the final score and decided to be generous with the 7.
The first 30-45 minutes consisted of a bland and boring, generic revenge plot done a million times before. It eventually shifts gears and gets slightly better, but this nearly 2.5 hour movie could have been 2 hours without the sleep-inducing introduction.
The cinematography was the only standout quality, and there were a number of visually stunning shots. The aforementioned popcorn-suffers will probably enjoy this one quite a bit. If you care about plot and character development, this ain't it chief.
Prepare yourself for a number of eye rolls as the big reveals and epic conclusion fall completely flat. Or, do like the rest of the people on here who rated this 9-10 and play games on your cell phone or scroll social media while occasionally glancing at the screen and going "oooooh woooow".
TLDR: This is what happens when you give a bad writer a huge budget and a good director.
[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.
The mention of this being an "arthouse film" is inevitable due to some demographics strangely expecting this to be some action-packed Vikings or Game of Thrones (let's just say then thsi is a wrong film to watch). But I'd like to say that The Northman is much less arthouse-y than Robert Eggers' previous films like The Lighthouse.
Which is a good thing. The film is visceral, and it takes its time to build the atmosphere of tense, anger, anddiscomfrot through sequences of long shots and vivid hallucination as experienced by Amleth. I was expecting this to be much more arthouse-y especially in the beginning, but the film gets into the meat of the story very quickly in the beginning (the death of the king and Amleth's quest for revenge). Even during the long momentums Amleth spends to indulge himself in revenge is full of composites through the play of sound design, music, and shots of the character's emotion or their lucid imagination.
Although yes, the film does not draw the line between vision/hallucination with the actual events happening, and the ambiguous boundaries between magic and reality, there is almost none of the shot that feels like a filler as is common in arthouse films. I'd even say Amleth's imaginative battle to obtain the Draugr sword is not a waste of sequences as it sufficiently depicts his conquest of himself and his journey into the depths of revenge that he can only imagine prior but not actually take it.
Despite being testorone-inducing by showing sweaty muscular men fighting on the field (or on the bed with their women, at times), I find the film's aim to say about the pointlessness of revenge is clearly stated.
The sequences where Amleth realizes the situation with his father reclined him to reconsider his goal of revenge, only to gain enough drives when he realizes what it would cost in the future. And although the ending with triumphant music admittedly seems a bit ambiguously glorify Amleth's ambition to be awaited in valhalla, but we've shown the folly he has to go through and even when it had to cost him the people he thought would dear to him.
The last scene reminds me eerily of The Revenant - in fact, the whole film's bleakness reminds me of it. But if The Revenant's bleakness hinge upon the desolation, desperate, and cold world of DiCaprio's character's perilous attempt at survival, the grim world of The Northman inhabited by Skarsgaard's character is a world of sorcery, rage, and trollish vengeance of undying spirits.
I think Eggers has done a wonderful job in bringing to life the vengeful spirit of the Bjornulfr with his own style.
Heads up: I know that there are a lot of folks going into this expecting it to scratch the same itch as Game of Thrones or Vikings.
You’re going to come out extremely disappointed if you expect that.
This is way slower and artsier than your average 'manly' action movie, the tone and feel are more akin to something like The Revenant
Alright, so I did not give this its due the first time around, here are my updated thoughts.
The first thing that stood out to me during the rewatch is how much of the imagery had already burned itself into my brain, there are so many fantastic long takes that I still easily remembered months after seeing it the first time.
I love the brutal and raw feel, which combined with the score creates a very good sense of atmosphere.
The characters clicked for me this time around, a lot of their development is done in subtle and visual ways (pay attention to how cold Skardsgard’s character claims he is versus how he acts). As a result, I wasn’t bored and the pacing fell into place for me.
While the story is still a little by the numbers and predictable, I picked up on this theme of the toxicity and pointlessness of revenge, which sets it apart from similar stories like The Lion King or Hamlet.
The action slaps, but I’m still not a fan of some of the arthouse touches. For example I don’t get what that hallucination fight during the sword retrieval scene wants to convey.
But yeah, it’s much better than I initially gave it credit for, even if it’s nowhere near peak Eggers.
7.5/10
This is the tale of a young boy sworn to avenge his father's death. Amleth is the boy who ends up growing into a heartless monster, killing and conquering without conscience. He meets a beautiful woman who is a sorceress of sorts and together they work to destroy the small farming kingdom of his father's killer.
As is the case with all Robert Eggers films, this doesn't fit into a typical Hollywood movie template. This is not a sword-and-sandals or cliched Viking adventure. It's slow-moving but gory and realistic. There are shocking moments of brutality, like women and children being picked from conquered villages to be turned into slaves for sale, work, or sex. There's a moment where we see a random child plucked from her mother and locked into a building with many others, which is then promptly set ablaze. In another scene, Queen Gudrum (Nicole Kidman) goes absolutely berserk in a moment that shocked me.
Surprisingly, there are supernatural and mythical elements introduced, and I would have to watch this film again to figure out how much they aided Ameth's quest for revenge.
This was probably my least favorite of Eggers's period Horror and Fantasy films ("The Witch" (2015), "The Lighthouse" (2019), but it's still impressive and engrossing.
Review by Kornelius Harda WicaksanaBlockedParent2022-05-16T18:49:40Z
81 I The Northman is about fury. How a boy becomes a man. How a man becomes a beast. A beast that can tear his prey apart like slaughtered sheep. A man who was born because of anger about his dead father. He promises his motherland he will avenge, save and kill. He is the one who decides on someone's faith. A noble prince with a rage. When you hear the howl of the wolves in the middle of the night, His rage comes to that land.
Alexander Skarsgård is a fantastic actor. His performance in Big Little Lies grabbed everyone's attention. Then he surprisingly played a character in Succession. Plus The Northman, he becomes an unbeatable actor. How his body movement and expression show the furiousness of a man. The moments when his character, Amleth attacked a village is the best performance of his in The Northman.
Alexander Skarsgård is certainly not the only one who has great performances in this film. Let's mention Ethan Hawke, Claes Bang, Willem Dafoe, Anya Taylor-Joy, and Nicole Kidman. They all killing the scene. Just a fun fact, Alexander Skarsgård, and Nicole Kidman had their performance together as husband and wife in Big Little Lies. That is why when we realized it, it felt a little weird watching their interaction in this film.
Robert Eggers is a very consistent director so far. After The Witch, The Lighthouse, and now The Northman, He truly can show the world his capability of directing. He is a rare talent in this modern cinema. He has his signature style in the way he directs his films. If you are familiar with his works, all his feature-length film has a similar tone. An old tale of an old historical story that is visualized in a dark tone. Every film he directs has great characters. He is a pure legend.
But unfortunately, The Northman is not appreciated by a general audience. Because of bad marketing and losing the competition with blockbuster films, its profit is not that great. A film that prioritizes art elements is often hard to accept by general audiences who seek entertainment only. We could not blame the people because every one of us has our reason when watching a film. That is why a director like Robbert Eggers should be respected because he still makes a film with his style without being attached to the popular film format.
We should also mention how great the cinematography is in this film. Almost every shots have a strong message for the sake of the story. It also helped us to feel the atmosphere of the old Nordic time. We could see how different the culture and the way they behave in this film if we compared it with modern-day people. Even to this day our civilization still has primitive tribes, it is different compared to The Northman which is complete madness. Just knowing the fact back in the day people act like that is incredible to think about.
My Instagram: @hardalikesmovies & @moviemanner
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Rating: 80.38
Plot
P1: 1.5
P2: 1.0
P3: 1.8
P4: 1.8
Director: Robert Eggers
Favorite Characters
1.7: Amleth
1.5: Queen Gudrún
1.4: King Aurvandil War-Raven
1.3: Olga of the Birch Forest
1.2: Fjölnir The Brotherless
1.0: Thórir The Proud
Character Score Meaning
0.0 - 0.1 - 0.2 - 0.3 - 0.4 : Terrible
0.5 - 0.6 - 0.7 - 0.8 : Bad
0.9 - 1.0 - 1.1 - 1.2 : Average
1.3 - 1.4 - 1.5 - 1.6 : Good
1.7 - 1.8 - 1.9 - 2.0 : Great