Okay, so it's low budget and yes, there's going to be limits to what you can do if you haven't got the cash but here's a good example of a film that needed to reign in it's scope and give over it's meager budget to a script writer who could perhaps deliver a character based story instead of this over extended film.
The story is a stock one of a hero who as a child witnesses their village being slaughtered, they grow up and you can guess the rest. It'll be familiar in fact to anyone who's seen Hrafninn flýgur (When The Raven Flies, 1984) but with more badly acted childhood scenes than your nearest school nativity play. In fact most casual viewers are going to be put off the film in the first twenty minutes because of the poor acting from the children in it - all except one child extra though, who during a camp fire story can be seen yawning and fidgeting as much as the audience probably is.
Then you have some really, really bad sound dubbing. Some dialogue sounds like it was re-done with a tape recorder in a church hall, complete with echo and background hiss, then dubbed back over.
So it's a low budget film and the maker's have rather cleverly used viking re-enactors in scenes such as the establishing shots of Kiev and the final climactic battle at the end. Unfortunately the costumes of the re-enactors, with all the proper kit they've got, actually shows up how basic the principal character's costumes are.
Then there's the cutting in of the film's principal actors into the previously recorded re-enactors battle scenes. They used to make post- World War II fighter ace films by cutting shots of the actors in a cockpit in with real footage of an actual dogfight. That's a trick they've tried to do here with a re-enactment battle but it's so obvious thanks to the different lighting, camera style, grade of film and background scenery that it's almost comical. You can see the main characters alone in a frame slashing at nothing because they were no where near the actual re-enactment battle in the first place!
So all in all it's not a great movie, even for an independent low budget one. Put it this way, if you've seen Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of America (2007) and managed to get to the end of it you'll probably make it to the end of this film. Just don't expect a great viking experience.
