Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of America

...and where are YOUR cinematic masterpieces? How many Oscar winning films have you made, Jack? Severed Ways may have sucked, but at least they went out and actually tried to make a movie. I really hate all the would-be "Critics" here who do nothing but complain about how bad every movie is, but yet, haven't made anything worthwhile themselves. Jealousy isn't a very flattering thing, which most "Critics" seem to be.

As far as the soundtrack is concerned, the music(although not really fitting into the movie very well), is at least different than the cookie-cutter music of almost every other "period" piece.

Now with a topic as exciting as the Norse discovery of North America and the intrigue of the fate of two lone Vikings left behind, you'd think this movie would be Awesome. On top of that the rich and amazing literary tradition of the Sagas provide ample material that would translate wonderfully to the screen. Simply filming the Vinland Sagas with Freydis and the feuding would have been a recipe for an incredible cinematic romp.

But two lost Vikings roaming the pre-Columbian expanse of North America - interacting with the tribes, encountering foreign peoples, flora and fauna, astonishing the natives etc - that could also have been an incredible story.

But no. With almost no dialogue and bad synth music, the viewer is subjected to an hour and a half of two guys cutting down trees and shitting in the woods.

This is not a movie that's so bad it's good. It's just bad.

There obviously were some major exploratory discoveries unrecorded in history that no human being alive today knows about. This movie depicts one of them and the subtitle gives it its significance. The two lost Vikings represent two elements that have created the American character, the heathen and the Christian, both so western in character. Here we see the first dude on our soil. We graphically see the most important defecation in the history of North America, the first human waste to touch and fertilize its soil and perhaps ultimately to make it toxic. The defecation becomes a ritual act. If guns, germs and steel conquered the North American wilderness, here we have only steel and no long term conquest; The sound of steel on wood is an underlying rhythm in the film. And it is very prescient that some of the chopping is mindless. The sound of the axes is woven into the incredible sound track. The film is very much about music. It is the exquisite lyrical blending of music and image that make this movie totally mesmerizing. Very little dialogue is needed and very little is supplied. This movie is not for film illiterates who think that the best of the best of the Dogma films is just unsteady camera work. This film will polarize the audience and separate the mindful from the mindless. The mindful being those who will love this genre creating movie.

As a huge fan of viking stories, I watched Severed Ways with hopeful eyes, but it seems that no-one but Hrafn Gunnlaugsson is ever going to get close to capturing anything that is close to what those days might have been like. The basic setup for the story is fine, but the lack of a script becomes a problem right away. Being from Sweden I was very annoyed with the few speaking parts - the director has stolen dialogue/sound from what seems to be an old Bergman film, and put subtitles to it that has nothing to do with what is spoken. That was just weird. I doubt that it is even legal. Chopping down trees right, left and center in the woods seems illegal as well, not to mention the killing of the chicken. This film obviously had no budget, so I doubt that Tony Stone had permits to do that. Burning down a church to the tunes of Burzum was a kick in the nuts to authority as well, as Varg Vikernes is in prison for doing just that. And still I kind of like this film - anybody can go out and capture what they want with a digital video camera, go nuts and produce something that is not that bad. I give kudos for effort - and the poop scene had me gagging for days;)

You remember the Blair Witch Project, where the three student filmmakers go out into the woods to shoot a movie only to lose their way and document the footage all along the way and then the footage is discovered some time later? Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of America is like what might have happened if a crew- far more inept and high-minded with their intentions- went into the woods to shoot a Viking movie... and they got out all fine and somehow got their piece of drek released. It's also an earnest, poetic tome to Odin! Oh, what joy, we don't get many of those in the independent film world. Even if you're a hardcore Odinist this film won't make you wonder much why.

This is a truly horrific spectacle of a first-time director taking the tools of film-making- if only the most grubby and cheap digital ones at his disposal- and using it to masturbate in the woods with his two Viking actors (one of them himself of course) and pretty much no real script. According to the press notes Tony Stone "had a bunch of ideas... definitely picked the most insane one". If this was said by David Lynch or Werner Herzog (the latter cited as an unfortunate influence by Stone) it might sound intriguing. In this case it's revealed in the worst possible ways. Severed Ways is a disaster on fronts of storytelling (or lack thereof), "acting", cinematography, editing, music, and general atmosphere. That it's also boring is heavy-duty icing.

Oh and speaking of story it is so loose a term to use that you'll be completely befuddled to find it, or care enough to: it's the 1100 and two Vikings (Stone and Tedesco, don't ask who is who) are the last ones left after a battle on the sea and are washed ashore on the North American continent, and so they go exploring or trying to find possible other Vikings to do Viking things like... chopping down trees, killing animals and sitting and grunting by fires, which is what the two of them do for the most part of the running time. There's also two monks that appear at one point (the senseless killing of two chickens, done as if for a do-it-yourself guide, takes up a lot of the time midway through), a couple of Indians here and there, oh, and the film is broken up into CHAPTERS: Chapter 1: Stranded, Chapter 2: Camp, Chapter 5: Encounters, Chapter 4's introduction isn't even shown but the "END OF CHAPTER 4" title card pops up (!) as if it will make things any clearer.

Fact is, there is no real clear story; compared to this Herzog's Aguirre is Law & Order. But the lack of a solid structure could be forgiven if at least the director gave us some good things to look at or characters to care about. Not only is there neither, but it is almost as though the filmmaker goes out of his way to make things whiplash about with this digital camera (at best, for a couple of scenes, we get a couple of decent shots ala travelogue out of Vermont, where the film was shot) in big chase or action scenes (what few there are), or else Stone becomes entranced by a flickering fire or on lingering on a long shot on the two Vikings for absolutely no artistic reason whatsoever except to have pointless and pretentious lingering punctuated by the occasional random, awkward image of a frog or spider.

That the lighting is also done to wretched extremes (one may be blinded from time to time by the lack of an actual filter to not make the sun as blinding as in real life) is another issue altogether. Compacting these ugly images and usage of the digital lens is the editing by Stone himself which becomes so jittery, or on the flipside nonexistent, that it gives a very strong argument why a director should not sit alone for four months and edit like this case. There is also the issue of acting, which is nil since the cinematography and editing assists in taking away anything these two guys have to offer- not to mention dubbing (that's right, dubbing) of Nordic or Swedish dialog or whatever that sounds ripped off of 1950s newsreels whenever the characters aren't getting their Quest for Fire on. Lastly, there's the music, which ranges from at best tolerable (Queens of the Stone Age) to ear-bleeding (Dimmu Borgir to name one, but they all blend together after a while).

Bottom line, this is a hodge-podge, a low-budget train-wreck that could be fun to mock- maybe someone will be creative and do a well-deserved Mystery Science Theater 3000 on it- if it weren't so mind-numbingly boring. That may be, as Frank Capra once noted, the ultimate crime of the film: if Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of America had at least entertained in its demented and awful poetry like Apocaypto it could be laughable. It is, ultimately, a practically unequivocal waste of time right now in movies.