The Northman is a silly, cautionary tale about what happens when small indie movies have big budgets. The answer is a volcano fight.
I went in cold and didn’t know it was going to be a gritty, Realistic (kind of?) retelling of the Hamlet story. Anya Taylor-Joy was in Robert Eggers’s first film (The VVitch) and was underutilized, Friend and I both agree. There’s this moment early on when she teams up with Alexander Skaarsgard and says that he can break people’s bodies with his body and she can break men’s minds with her mind, but then we never actually watch her do that. She uses her knowledge of the land to cause some problems, sure, and we see her run around a naughty little orgy, and be naked in a lot of places, but not that much mind fuckery.
Robert Eggers talks about how he’s not able to watch The VVitch because he recognizes that his skills were not fully formed yet as a filmmaker, and my question is, what are the skills you fully formed where you feel like this is a film you can stand more proudly behind? It feels like Zack Synder but less stylized? He says it has to do with the amount of “grit” in the movie, but I think it’s probably about the number of abs? We haven’t even talked about white supremacy yet, and I’m not super interested in wading into whether that’s even an issue worth considering.
The moments that are weird are great (Buzzfeed, of all places, has compiled a list I completely agree with about the top ten strangest, most distinctive choices in the film). The trippy scenes that diverge from reality are Friend’s favorite moments, the sword fight in the catacomb, the oracle appearing upon his return, the crows and the noose. There’s a single shot battle scene which is a thing of beauty for the objectification of violence. If I can give you a recommendation for something to look forward to, it’s probably the Nordic haka after the hakunamatata scene when Amleth grows up.
But this is not that you need to rush to theaters for. I don’t really know who this movie is for, except that it kind of reminds me of the Lighthouse in that it feels hyper masculine, macho, so if you’re not into that you’re gonna get turned off pretty quickly.
