The Northlander

Bad acting, production, videography and sound... such a terrible waste of time. There's absolutely no way this POS has such a high rating other than fake reviews. The entire production crew must have been employed to create accounts and give fake high star ratings. Don't believe the fake reviews!

The Northlander has perhaps the most inane dialogue I have ever listened to in a movie. The sound could have been shut off, or the movie shot as a silent and I would have followed the plot just as well.

I'm not really sure what this movie was about. There are nomadic tribes in a dystopian future. Cygnus the Hunter is sent on a quest to... I don't know what. Characters wax philosophical between poorly choreographed fight scenes, but the dialogue doesn't move the plot forward. It's all rather pointless.

Scenes don't seem to go anywhere. e.g. A tribesman is hauling in a fishing net from the river, he sees something horrible in the net, falls down screaming. While fallen over he spots a smoke plume on the horizon and yells to the tribe the bad guys are coming and scampers off in terror. But what the hell was in the fishing net? At least I assume he was fishing, no one eats or drinks in the year 2961, have humans evolved to live entirely on love? Well perhaps because the bad dudes can survive in the desert-like conditions of the badlands carrying no water or food.

One of the main reasons I went to see this was it is shot in the Drumheller badlands. And we see characters running up and down the clay hills and jumping on the hoodoos. Okay. The Alberta outdoor settings, prairies and badlands, I found disappointing - looks like it was shot in fall and filmed late afternoon each day casting long shadows and giving muted colours. Everything is brown, sepia coloured, drab. I've been there, in spring and summer it's quite colourful and beautiful. A chance lost by the film makers in my opinion, filmed the wrong time of year.

This movie appears to be a Mad Max ripoff, and unfortunately a poor one. The weaponry is likely purposefully goofy, you might get a kick out of some of the crazy spears and clubs carried by the warriors. Other than that, blech.

I was amused by the diversity in ratings: 7.5 average from supposedly 500+ people. But only eight reviews? Six of those (evidently the honest ones) are very negative and all state the same thing: no comprehensible plot line. The other two reviews, both praising the film, are in the same chopped-English. Bogus positive reviews? Bogus ratings? Obviously so. First, a good movie doesn't get 500 ratings and only 8 reviews. Second, the chopped-English positive reviews make it pretty evident they were bought (or from foreign members of the crew). Result: I have better things to do with my time than watch an obviously scammed film.

Hyped with tons of **fake, duplicate reviews by the cast and producers.** Notice how the written reviews on IMDb are nearly all around 2/10 stars, while the IMDb score is 8.4 based on only 500 reviews. You can see how all the written reviews on letterboxd are duplicates with the same review text in French written under different names (http://letterboxd.com/film/the-northlander/). Seems like an interesting Mad Max-like premise but its obviously an **indie film**, so don't watch expecting it to be even a B-list movie.

It is obvious that this movie had its viewer rating box stuffed to some extent, I see this kind of thing a lot, especially with the occasional big money project, although I don't think this is a BIG money project.

It is also obvious some people have written negative reviews on this movie who may not have even watched it.

There are some things about this particular movie that are exceptional. The costume and make up was done really well. Many of the actors have hideous scars and they are wearing pretty realistic post apocalyptic clothes. Now mind you, I never could figure out how they got the scarring, which seemed to be a central theme to the movie, or why the scarring was significant, nonetheless, the people who did the work did an excellent job.

The camera work was very good, and the cinematography was at times breath taking. This was complimented by appropriate decent sounding back ground music. The acting was also decent. (The weapons were kind of ludicrous though). Editing however seemed to be non existent, as one time a wad of snot came out of the male protagonist's nose, you would think the people in charge of the movie at the very least would have edited this out.

So some of the ingredients were there for a very good movie. The major problem with it is that after an hour a viewer still does not really know what is going on. We are given a synopsis of the movie, and there is a narrated intro at the start, but even with those it does not come together. I lay this squarely at the feet of director/writer.

I feel sorry for all the movie crew who did such good work, it was wasted effort. The guy who shouldered this project should have allowed constructive criticism at each stage of this movie, especially in the script and story boarding. It must be nice to have that kind of money to spend as you want, but its definitely not fair to those who turned in first class work on the project, hoping for recognition.