Valhalla Rising

As far as bizarre and uncomfortable art films go, Nicolas Winding Refn's Valhalla Rising is pretty tame. In fact, it is so comparatively tame that the film's marketers felt they could serve it up as an action-packed Viking film—a terrible decision that caused the film to be a horrendous flop; because after all, this is a bizarre and uncomfortable art film. When I say "tame," of course, I do not mean it does not have an explicit evisceration scene—because it does—I mean it has a relatively discernible plot and characters with names.

The protagonist, One Eye (Mads Mikkelsen in a stark, fearsome performance), does not say a single word in the entire film. The other characters do a lousy job of filling in the silence, for I think I counted somewhere in the vicinity of twenty-four lines in total.

In addition to long periods of silence, the film also features clay-covered voodoo rock men, inverted dream sequences (I think), and a lot of existential symbolism—making it, without a doubt, a very bizarre and uncomfortable art film.

(Disclaimer: The film features starkly beautiful cinematography and brilliant performances. Certainly worth watching)

"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 porn 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 was expecting an epic battle movie about Vikings (as my mistake was to not check who's the director) and hell was I mistaken. What was delivered was an astonishing movie about humanity. In my humble opinion this is a masterpiece, despite being visually and acoustically amazing it is an in-depth look into mankind as it is rarely found. There is a lot in this movie (which in itself is amazing when one is looking on the minimal use of words)and I have to admit I did not get all the hints and metaphors used.

If you want entertainment go and watch something else use your brain and you will enjoy this movie! I normally do not write reviews or rate movies here but I strongly felt that this movie was underrated by a mile. Further, this reminded me to go and finally buy Denmarks best trilogy!

When I heard there was going to be a Viking movie with Mads Mikkelson, and I saw the trailer for it, I was very very intrigued. I am of the opinion that a serious Viking drama has never been done well or respectfully, so I was really hoping that I might get that here.

Unfortunately, the plot of Vallhalla Rising is so shallow and near meaningless that I must admit that I'm still waiting.

That being said, if judged in terms of cinematic and visual experience, it was beautifully shot, and the much vaunted fights scenes (especially the ones in the beginning) were awesome in their brutality. The director sets great scenes in some awesome locations, so your eyes will be in for a treat... but don't expect riveting plot. Rather, think of this as an arts movie with a bit of brutal violence in it.

Hell, I just wished they named the movie better. The fact these characters are Norse is just about irrelevant... they could have plugged a number of different cultures into this story-line, change a few slight details and the difference to the core story would have been negligible. Way to name a movie Valhalla Rising' simply because otherwise the idea that there are Vikings in this movie is not reinforced heavily enough.

So, watch if you want a artsy visual experience... don't sit down with a bunch of friends expecting a action blockbuster. This is not it.

But I'll try, how about horrible or awful or abysmal? No, those are too gentle for what has to be one of most self absorbed, pretentious, and poorly directed films I've ever seen and definitely the absolute worst of the Viking genre.

I stumbled upon this film not knowing what to expect beyond the brief description of the movie in the summary and a few of the rosier reviews would lead one to believe that his is a piece of life changing existentialist art. Those reviews are every bit as vacuous and pretentious as the aimless direction provided by Nicolas Refn. How self involved, how self important, how narcissistic was Refn's directing? We could have spent 90 minutes watching Refn masturbate on film, and in essence that's just what we did.

Let us start with the historical inaccuracies which abound in this "work of art" to such a degree that one must not only suspend disbelief, one must take it out into the woods and leave it for dead. When directing a period film it's not always necessary to get every little detail right, but it would be nice if you could at least get the basics down but even that is beyond Refn. In fact he does manage to achieve the near impossible, getting almost nothing right. The boat, the weapons, the armor, their hygiene, the settlement, their customs...honestly next to "Valhalla Rising" the 1954 classic "Prince Valiant" is practically historical documentary. Well strike one, if we can't have even rudimentary accuracy then at least we'll have an interesting story right? Right? Wrong. What we have instead is a display of Refn's conceit as he presents us with a script that is half art house cinema and half epic drama, and yet it is both uninteresting and banal. About half way through the film it suddenly dawned on me WHY it was so badly written. It is badly written because Refn had no clue how to write either an art film or an epic, so what he did was write to formula what he thought an art film and an epic should have. You can almost hear him checking off the list "...mysterious warrior (check), barbaric Vikings (check), filthy Christian crusaders (check), clash of cultures (check), existential struggle (check), recurring themes (check)..." and the result is a hackneyed script written in a paint by numbers manner that has neither soul nor inspiration. You can tell, too, because as good as the acting is you simply cannot bring yourself to care about anyone in the film. The pacing is atrocious, the dialog bounces between being merely bad to painfully over wrought, and much of the acting is tired and uninspiring. The saving grace of the film is the wonderful cinematography, oh, and the scenery is nice, except when the actors are chewing it of course.

All in all this was an immense waste of time and I'd not even have bothered to review it except the people who keep writing these glowing "oh it's a life altering masterpiece" need to be balanced out with a healthy dose of reality.