Valhalla Rising

Too slow boring been watching some mads mikkelsen movies recently but i don't like this one so far waste of time

"The Big Sleep" with Humphrey Bogart is famous for being more about the parts themselves than the sum. Valhalla rising in my opinion is very similar. The cinematography and the sound editing trump all the other aspects of the film. It does indeed deal heavily in ambiguous symbolism and I am sure one could draw parallels with a number of sources. The story is really not as complicated as has been made out on these message boards. There is no clear answer to this film but at the same time you will not feel robbed by the this, there is a definite beginning, middle and end. It's best just to sit back and enjoy the menace that permeates the entire film, even having known the ending from some careless commentator I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of watching this. I would not however have enjoyed 3 hours of it, but it is only 90 minutes long so is perfect. The violence is really not that bad, there are so many worse films for this...'irreversible, brave-heart and any gore * movie doing the rounds.' Go see this film, enjoy for it's stunningly visuals, startling audio and general intensity. Oh, and I did not enjoy his previous film 'Bronson' art house British movies just look horrible, this is beautiful. Similar to the thin red line but not as long and tedious.

I couldn't finish this movie last night, so I was interested in what other IMDb reviewers thought. Imagine my surprise upon reading positive review after positive review. I didn't finish them all, so there may be negative reviews out there. Since I am going to write a negative review, here are my credentials: M.A. in anthropology, graduate level courses in Old Norse language and saga literature, paper on Victor Turner and his misuse of sagas to analyze symbolic anthropology, archaeologist, practical knowledge in viking weapons and armor, both crafting them for sale and fighting in them in SCA-style combat (Society for Creative Anachronisms). My people come from Norway and Sweden and have been farmers for the last 400 years (as far back as I can trace). I also understand the berserker mindset intimately. To start off, slaves were too highly prized to be slaughtered for entertainment. Horsefighting was the preferred Old Norse analog to gladiatorial entertainment. Real men used real swords and hacked each other to death for purposes of law, or revenge, or real wealth changing hands. Shields were just as important as swords in these duels. The overall level of filth was not only unhygienic and would have led to death, but also unlikely because the Norse were often quite vain and bathed a lot. Around 1000 AD, the ladies at the English court preferred Norse warriors to the Anglo-Saxons because they bathed regularly. There doesn't seem to be any settlements around and the idea you could maintain a trained fighter in a wind-blown cage on a diet of gruel and no daily exercise is ludicrous. The ridiculously small boat with low gunnels could never have gone anywhere besides along a coast, much less a deep sea voyage to Canada. That boat would have never made it to the Orkneys! As for the location, one of the Christians mentions they are in Sutherland, which locates them in Scotland. I have done several bike tours in Scotland and the terrain is right, but the adaptations to the environment are all wrong. It really does take a community working together to make a living in such a land. The upshot is that the director was probably limited in his budget, but the level of detail has an important role in making a movie. The introduction of Chrisianity into Scandinavia around 1000 AD was based on cold-blooded calculation of wealth and domination. It was not a bunch of half-starved groaty cast-offs wandering around trying to save their souls or mitigate some sort of existential psychological pain inside their heads. Any Old Norse warrior would laugh or be insulted by such a characterization (or both!). If this was supposed to be some sort of oblique view of what modern soldiers are going through in their psychological difficulties with incipient PTSD, it fails miserably. There is more than a little bureaucracy in any structured warrior grouping and certainly in the Viking Age. Read a little about the Jomsvikings if you don't believe me. This movie was all about fantasies - fantasies driven by very little knowledge of what life was like back then or what life is like now. If you want a REAL look at combat and the mindset of the vikings, go to the sagas first, and then do a little more digging into the mythology and skaldic verse. I suggest Njals Saga, Egils Saga or Grettirs Saga as good places to start. Njals Saga especially has a good look at the introduction of Christianity into Iceland. As I have said many times before, "No anthropologists were harmed in the making of this film."

This film comes with a lot of baggage a fact reflected from the critical reception it got on its release . Some people thought it was a masterpiece whilst others thought it was pretentious self indulgent torture * . Likewise the comments here that seems to split people right down the middle . Somewhat typically I could only award it 5 out of 10 because seeing it my rating for this film wavered between 1 and 10 . It wavers from dreadful pretentious rubbish and masterpiece from scene to scene To be honest I almost switched off after the first ten minutes as a one eyed man stands leashed to a pole and indulges in mortal combat in 11th Century Europe . Nothing is held back in this scene of violence or indeed in the suceeding scenes that sees heads bashed in and disembowelment . One can quite understand watching this in the cinema and seeing half the audience walk out in disgust . The film doesn't help its cause much by having little dialogue and the need to insert bizarre surreal sequences in to the narrative The film does pick up when One Eye and his child companion come across Christian converts who wish to travel to Jerusalem to fight in the Crusades and board a boat a boat to the Holyland only to come across a strange place that geographically is not in the Middle East . Here the film works at its best as the characters try and work out the mystery of where they are and what fate has in store for them . At this point it's almost like APOCALYPSE NOW meets Tarkovsky Impressive as this is director Nicholas Winding Refn feels the need to go overboard on the directing front and he's neither Tarkovsky or Francis Ford Coppola . Certainly the film has a sense of intelligible portent dread throughout but like his previous film BRONSON Refn shows off a little too much which becomes painfully irritating . Less would have certainly been more This interferes with whatever the subtext the narrative might been making . There's an ecclestastical meaning there somewhere . One character refers to One Eye " He has many Gods while we only have one ( Christopher Hitchen's would reply to this by saying " Good because we're getting closer to the true figure " ) and of course the characters are trying to sail to the Holy Land but this is undone by the pretentious imagery . Strangely the film features a twist ending that possibly isn't entirely leftfield since the characters drink a psychotropic brew that has a mystical maninkari effect , but this leads the audience to ask how anyone can sail to the Middle East only to end up in North America ? I tried to like VALHALLA RISING and from a technical viewpoint it is very impressive . Unfortunately the director sabotages his own film by including too much gore and too much " Oh look at me aren't I being so clever ? " to the detriment of storytelling and subtext. It's difficult to see what market the film is trying to buy in to . Is it the historical epic crowd , the horror crowd or the art-house crowd ? This makes for a very unsatisfying film

OK first review so not so much a review but more of an astonishment. A phenomenal piece of work that I'm sure will stick in the little grey cells for a while. Touches on many issues at deceptively deep levels. The rise of Christianity and its nonsense versus the nature of man and his innate morality. Importantly and despite the tensions, it gives you the time to digest the motivations of Iron age man. You become Iron age man. Women do not feature and they can think themselves lucky. Brutal fights. And when I say brutal I mean you do not see men but animals. You see man the animal. Breathtaking stuff. I saw this in Paris today and of the 10 or so people to leave the cinema, all bar one were female. The other was a trudging male. The main character does a fantastic job of being a guardian angel in disguise. The source of such brutality is so engagingly pure, that without uttering a single syllable he carries the group of crusaders with him. He is iron age warrior and if you saw him in the street he would not be your first choice for theatre advice. For one he is mute, has one eye and wields an axe. If you do not know exactly where I am going with this don't be alarmed as neither do I. Do however go and see why for yourselves.

Damn! This was, like, the most frustrating kind of cinematic disappointment you can imagine. On one hand you expect a completely different and much more virulent kind of action movie, but on the other hand you totally can't claim that this was a terrible movie. Okay, admittedly, I expected non-stop swashbuckling, blood-dripping Viking spectacle and relentless violence from "Valhalla Rising", but can you blame me? The title and the awesome film poster, depicting a chained warrior with only one eye and war symbols painted on his muscular chest, alone were enough to make my mouth water. There are far too few genuine Viking movies out there, and since this is a local Scandinavian product, I honestly assumed it would have been a kick-ass movie. Instead, "Valhalla Rising" is a slowly unfolding and brooding epic with melancholic themes and unimaginably beautiful photography. Mads Mikkelsen, Denmark most talented actor even though he doesn't speak a single word in this film, stars as the charismatic and fierce warrior One-Eye (aptly baptized by his 10-year-old travel companion) who lives the miserable life in captivity. Viking tribes use him as their deadliest weapon in random gladiator games until, one day; he breaks his chains and regains freedom. Followed around by the one boy who treated him somewhat decently, One-Eye joins a clan of self-acclaimed crusaders intending to travel to Jerusalem with a vessel and re-conquer the holy land of God. The pacing is incredibly (at times even intolerably) slow and there's hardly any dialog in the film at all. More than once, "Valhalla Rising" actually reminded me of the legendary spaghetti westerns directed by Sergio Leone, and particularly "Once Upon A Time in the West". That movie – one of the greatest ones ever made, by the way – is also very slow and seemingly purposeless, but simultaneously boosts an atmosphere that is consistently ominous and unsettling. "Valhalla Rising" exists of multiple chapters, seven in total if I remember correctly, but nevertheless maintains a simple and chronological narrative. The crusade to Jerusalem is a marvelous symbolic criticism towards warfare in the name of religion; although I remain convinced the journey could have used action & bloodshed instead of hints at supernaturalism. Mikkelsen (the bad dude in Casino Royale) is terrific and it's remarkable how he must trained to get a body like that, but his character could have been so much more fascinating. Writer/director Nicolas Winding Refn ("Fear X", "Bronson") is definitely courageous and visionary, but I just hope that his film won't be misinterpreted or inaccurately promoted. If sold as a wildly exciting and blood-soaked Viking spectacle in Hollywood or so, "Valhalla Rising" is bound to become very unpopular.

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The film was nicely photographed throughout. And I enjoyed when the religious nuts muttered their mindless gibberish. The kill scenes were nicely done with crisp audio effects but the digital blood was a bit obvious. They could have used some practical effects instead of opting out with digital blood. Overall, the film seemed overly pretentious with an air of artsy fartsy. Mads is a great actor and I did not mind the fact that he had no speaking role. The other actors seem to be merely reciting lines from the script. I think the potential was there for some fine performances from the other characters, but they appeared somewhat restrained. I think if some nice death metal was thrown in, it would have been a fantastic extended music video.

The images and atmosphere are remarkable in this raw movie that is very different than one would first expect. I realized after a while that the character One Eye could be symbolic for Odin. The Pagan vs Christian thinking is interesting. All that is being said about how the Christian God frees you from suffering, seems futile in a world of immense pain and suffering. One Eye however, seems to be free from this. He simply IS. Ever wandering, as in search of something. I can't help but think of Odin again. What an absolutely fascinating movie!