The Guild

But alas, mind you, this could have been a very good movie..

What this film suffers from, and so many other Swedish contemporary films, are the lack of individuality. The glances towards Hollywood are obvious especially in the editing and the cliché's in manuscript. The script is the biggest flaw here. The historical angle (even though a bit resculpted) works fine, but the dialog is absolutely horrible. And as mentioned the cliché's and straight forward plot could have (and has been) stolen from many American adventurefilms. The camera work are very good, the mis-en-scene works fine as well even though the budget was low. Some of the wholeness and flow is disrupted and destroyed from the editing, especially in the fighting scenes. It seems that sometimes the producer has stepped in and said "Too little action here boys, fix that!" The result is just bad version of Matrix crosscutting. Sound works fine as well, works fine on surround. The music tends to be a bit repetitive though. The last twenty minutes plays the same "tick-tock" inspired music that has been in every Swedish TV- production since times beginning. (A pedagogical way to show the viewer that time is of essence. Feel free to get stressed.)

All in all it works as a film made for TV. There are some good actors here but they often get nowhere with their twodimensional characters and lousy dialog.

Biggest plus: A daring try to make film out of Swedish history. Biggest minus: The scriptwriter should be flogged.

4/10

Why? Well, where do we start? - The people known as "snapphanar" called themselves "Friskyttar", meaning Free Shooters - snapphane was the degrading expression used by The Swedish.

• The Costune designer should be put in jail, or at least in historical style education, for using typical 18th century clothing, which is a mistake often seen by role playing amateurs with no money and little knowledge of history, but this was supposed to be SVT's huge expensive great big mega Xmas project...? Hello??!

• The script is a disaster, the plot is ridiculously easily foreseen and the dialog is embarrassingly bad.

• There are so many historical errors and anachronisms that lining them all up here would probably crash the IMDb's disc space. artistically I 'm OK with anachronism, but the production team should always be aware of what they do and why. Seems like Snapphanar was made by a bunch of teenagers whose sole historical knowledge comes from many a late night playing dungeons and dragons... which is a wonderful way of starting an interest in history but it just won't do as full education.

• Dramatically there are also a lot of errors in continuity as well as in credibility. Example: The soldiers guarding the coach with the royal treasure chest seem to be totally unaware of the noise and flickering fire lights coming from the village where the rebels have started a riot.

• And Svart-Stina, what can you say...? Her outfit on the royal ball is not exactly what one would call discreet. *sigh*

• Snapphanar is of course to be regarded as a fantasy, a fictitious tale woven and embroidered upon the cloth of authentic history. But it has been done by people lacking too much knowledge.

• A non-Swede would probably not notice, but the use of Scanian accent in this project is unfortunately, and as many times before, a total disgrace to its audiences. The only actors who actually knows how to speak Scanian - Harald Leander, Per Lasson, to mention some - use accents from a totally different area, but at least they know how to speak it and unlike Jörgen Persson they also know acting. The leading actors, however, André Sjöberg and Malin Morgan (former Larsson), well educated and all, doesn't seem to have had very much time to learn their character's way of talking, there are loads of mal-functious pronunciations that really hurt the ear and is very hard to understand also for a Scanian. Those Scanians living in the Göinge area must feel totally lost and quite embarrassed - I don't think they recognize much. For once it's easy to understand those otherwise pompous Stockholmers who claim that they possibly just cannot understand Scanian Sw3edish. I think not even Scanians understand the gibberish urging from the mouths of Svart-Stina and Nils Getting. Sad.

• According to SVT ( Swedish Television)'s homepage the shooting of the entire miniseries took 47 days. That's quite fast for such a prestigious project. Especially considering the fact that the directors have worked 2 and a half years on creating the series. Seems like 90% of the time and financial resources have been spent on special effects. They're quite nice. But nothing that we haven't already seen in films like LOTR, Gladiator, Braveheart a.s.o.

• The same thing could be said about the music that, stuffed like a plum pudding with movie score clichés and with some small exceptions sounds like a total ripoff from anything produced by Jerry Bruckheimer. Very Where Eagles Dare, very U.S. Marine Corps, very Hollywood, very full of sound and fury signifying nothing.

Pity.

Sorry, must have missed it as a mini. You do mean mini as a min-series on TV don't you? I only saw it as a 2h40m movie of DVD and it was superb. I have alway envisioned Snapphanar as the ultimate freedom-fighters even though I'm a Swede to the death. This movie puts my priorities to shame when you see what atrocities the Swedish army condoned to get the job done, the job being showing the farmers of Skåne what would happen if they supported the Danish army and the Swedes would win the war war. To all you non-swedes, this movie is a cross between The Patriot and Sleepy Hollow, aka Time Well Spent. Of course there is no Gibson or Depp in this one, and it's in a foreign language, but hey!, you might enjoy it anyway =)

It's a good film. I just watched and expected more or less a cheesy adventure. And while the first 40 minutes of the film are as if lifted from a Hollywood adventure movie, it then unravels into something more intriguing and interesting. The ending is definitely worth waiting for. Lots of twists as well.

Swedish themes surge through the entire film, however. These might be hard to pick up for a non-Swede but they are there. The Swedish idea of pacifism and neutrality shows itself in form of the king (Gustaf Skarsgård) Carl XI, who only wants to kick the Danes out of his lands and sign a peace treaty. Evil, on the other hand, are not the Danes, but rather a greedy Nobleman who wants to conquer Denmark and all the states surrounding the Baltic Sea. This is a rather modern conception as well. Back then, Denmark and Sweden WERE enemies. And they probably did one-another as "evil".

The production value is surprisingly high. I was expecting something really poor in terms of... everything really. But the film team really pulled it off well. My only gripe is that in certain scenes where extras are involved, they pull of a really bad acting job. I don't know why, but Swedish filmmakers don't seem to give the same heart and soul into their extras as, say, Hollywood producers would.

In any case, the story is good. Keeps you on your toes wondering what will happen next. It's not always perfectly paced, however. I found the film to pace badly towards the middle. But after awhile it comes back in full swing.

Watch it if you want to see a good adventure. Swedish people probably get to hung up on the fact that it's "Swedish" and thus dismiss it outright before they even see it. But it's good! Surprisingly good, actually. So if you're Swedish and have already decided that you're going to hate this film, don't bother. If you want a good historical adventure, on the other hand, then watch this!

This is a poor series when it comes to the script. The filming is OK, but the dialogue is really just a waste of time. The characters are just repeating themselves and talking about what to do instead of actually doing it (but perhaps that's pretty accurate when it comes to portraying swedes?).

I can't see why there should be a problem to create a great story on the subject, with all the necessary ingredients. It seems no time at all was spent on doing research. I do NOT want Sweden to go down the road of "nevermind historical correctness, just give the audience a story" when it comes to movies based on actual historic events or periods of time.

The potential was there, but this production blew it.