![]() ![]() Or you could just watch for the glistening muscles, famous faces, bad accents, bad wigs, guttural score, and weird imagery. You could laugh at some of its over-the-top machismo but I feel like Eggers is inviting criticism of that very machismo, so enjoy the movie on one level where it indulges all the Old World violence, and then enjoy it on another level where it subverts and castigates the same Old World violence. The Northman is transporting and bold and also more than a bit bloated. This is a slow movie, which does contribute to its mood and atmosphere, but I also wish Eggers had gotten to some of his plot points with a bit more haste and vigor. There's more that can be unpacked but I wish Eggers had cut back at points. It's a movie that provides the red meat and then makes you question whether you might want to go vegan. ![]() At a lugubrious 140 minutes, there's enough sticky carnage to satiate fans of brutish medieval action movies, but I appreciated how Eggers keeps his story purposely streamlined and simplistic until a few keen reveals force the audience and protagonist to re-examine the assumptions and fleeting honor of vengeance in this harsh, unfair environment of men out-killing one another. It's staggering that a studio provided Eggers with $90 million to go make his version of Conan the Barbarian. The camerawork is often long with single takes, making all the visual arrangements and coordination that much more impressive. It's also unmistakably the work of Eggers, a very precise and idiosyncratic indie director whose prior movies felt like stylistic dares. The Northman reminds me a lot of Mel Gibson's Apocalypto, a movie I described back in the day as "an art film for jocks." It's immersive and impressive down to the exact detail, and it doesn't shirk on the blood and combat. It's a tale so old that it inspired Shakespeare's Hamlet, though that play could have benefited from a climax involving two hulking naked men dueling to the death atop an exploding volcano. But things soon take a dramatic turn from simple errands. Story Mylne, an apothecary, searches the Mysterious Forest for ingredients so that she can brew her potions. This is the story of a young girl and her magical adventure. We follow Amleth (Alexander Skatsgard) who is a displaced prince who has sworn to kill his treacherous uncle and rescue his mother (Nicole Kidman). I want to preface this by stating that Märchen Forest is a ‘renewed’ version of a JRPG released in 2018 by the name of Märchen Forest: Mylne and the Forest Gift. Deep within a forest, in a place far, far away, there lived the most peculiar of inhabitants. Both movies take mythical, supernatural-aided tales of heroics and medieval masculinity and feed into the spectacle while also cleaving the legend to make way for a sense of humanity. Consider writer/director Robert Eggers' bloody Viking revenge movie as a companion piece to 2021's The Green Knight. ![]()
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