Valhalla Rising: A Review
July 19th 2010 15:25
1000 AD, for years, One Eye, a mute warrior of supernatural strength, has been held prisoner by the Norse chieftain Barde. Aided by Are, a boy slave, One Eye slays his captor and together he and Are escape, beginning a journey into the heart of darkness. On their flight, One Eye and Are board a Viking vessel, but the ship is soon engulfed by an endless fog that clears only as the crew sights an unknown land. As the new world reveals its secrets and the Vikings confront their terrible and bloody fate, One Eye discovers his true self.
Lou Lumenick of the New York Post wrote :
Visually striking but por tentous and pretentious, Danish director's Nicholas Winding Refn's follow-up to "Bronson" (this one is also in English) is pretty much a love-it or hate-it proposition.
Refn's countryman Mads Mikkelsen -- best known in the US as Le Chiffre in the "Casino Royale" remake -- is a hulking, mute killing machine who literally breaks out of his cage in the company of a youngster (Maarten Stevenson) who dubs him "One Eye" for obvious reasons.
"Valhalla Rising" is basically a series of battles, some involving Christian Vikings on a trip to Jerusalem, with chapter titles such as "Hell" substituting for an actual story. If you've ever wanted to see what a Terrence Malick remake of "Conan the Barbarian" might look like, this is the movie for you.
Philip French from the Observer wrote:
The confidently cosmopolitan Danish writer-director Nicolas Winding Refn first escorted us through the bloodstained, vomit-splattered, drug-polluted back streets of a Copenhagen omitted from guided tours for Hans Christian Andersen fans. He then took us to meet Britain's most dangerous criminal, Charles Bronson, in the rigorously guarded wings of Rampton and Broadmoor. His latest movie continues this unremittingly gloomy odyssey in the middle ages when, as Thomas Hobbes put it, the life of man was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short". A silent, speechless, one-eyed prisoner (baleful Danish star Mads Mikkelsen) escapes from his pagan captors and falls into the company of a party of Christian Vikings (all played by Scots) about to embark on a crusade. Unsure whether One-Eye is a visitor from heaven or hell, they take him with them on their longship across a misty sea.
They emulate, in reverse, the legendary American aviator Douglas "Wrong Way" Corrigan, who in 1938 set out to fly from New York to California but through an alleged misreading of his compass ended up in Ireland. His welcome in the Emerald Isle was, however, more enthusiastic than the one this film's Scandinavians receive in the New World. Valhalla Rising is like watching woad dry, but hypnotic, densely atmospheric in a portentous way, and weirdly beautiful. It does for the past what Cormac McCarthy's The Road does for the future, ie makes the present almost embraceable.
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Comment by Anonymous
Horrorphile
That appeals to me.
I enjoyed Centurion.