I got some pretty heavy Darren Aronofsky vibes from it. That's a compliment coming from me, because I've always liked his trippy visuals, like The Fountain, Noah, and Black Swan.
The surround sound and music in the theater was pretty spectacular.
It's a celebration of toxic masculinity!! Haha.. Men unable to help themselves from
Spoiler:
dying in battle for revenge and leaving their women behind, but of course to be reunited in the thereafter!
Dafoe served a small but vital role.
Spoiler:is probably the coolest movie prop I have ever seen. I'll be making an avatar of that when I get a chance, haha..
The prop of his decaying decapitated head
I suspected it might be something akin to Cage's Mandy after Jaden mentioned it was small on story/plot, but I found it MUCH more intriguing and thick in plot than Mandy. Pretty sure Mandy had NO progression of plot after the first act or so. This was intriguing all the way through.
I'm glad I didn't get too hyped for this and watch trailers a bunch, because it was a great little revenge adventure to see fresh in the theater.
Highly recommended. 👆 👆
Originally posted by Robtard
Watched it for a second time last night, actually dropped my view of it. 7.5/10 seems about right. The overuse of the mythological and psychedelic-like scenes were too heavy handed.eg Did the film really need three separate family tree/Yggdrasil scenes? I don't think so.
Honestly, the film does a disservice to itself by telling the audience so little. Then again, that kind of film making and storytelling has fallen out of favor in the last 20 years.
The Northman is about a lot of Nordic saga myth tropes and values. Things like family bonds, revenge, heroic death in battle, inescapable Fate, magical swords, the Underworld (Draugr sequence in film), mysticism, and so on.
We're not meant to identify easily with the characters of the film like most standard epic action films. They're mythical. Even the dialogue reads like The Wanderer or Beowulf rather than audience-friendly common English. It captures some of the bleakness of Nordic mythology rather well, and eschews the Horny Vikings nonsense stuff like the Vikings TV show and AC Valhalla celebrate. Being a Northman means a hard life of being manipulated by forces that exist around you and before you came along.
There's a part during the funeral sequence where a holy man utters lines in ancient Norse, and I recognized some of them as a quote from the Hávamál.
One translation of the whole section reads like this:
'Cattle die and kinsmen die,
thyself too soon must die,
but one thing never, I ween, will die, --
fair fame of one who has earned.
Cattle die and kinsmen die,
thyself too soon must die,
but one thing never, I ween, will die, --
the doom on each one dead.'
You could argue, and probably successfully, that the Northman is not a well balanced drama or action film. That it doesn't live up to the idealistic tones of Gladiator or King Arthur or The Last Samurai etc. But what it does well is showcase its source material with very little artistic license.
Originally posted by Stealth Moose
Honestly, the film does a disservice to itself by telling the audience so little. Then again, that kind of film making and storytelling has fallen out of favor in the last 20 years.The Northman is about a lot of Nordic saga myth tropes and values. Things like family bonds, revenge, heroic death in battle, inescapable Fate, magical swords, the Underworld (Draugr sequence in film), mysticism, and so on.
We're not meant to identify easily with the characters of the film like most standard epic action films. They're mythical. Even the dialogue reads like The Wanderer or Beowulf rather than audience-friendly common English. It captures some of the bleakness of Nordic mythology rather well, and eschews the Horny Vikings nonsense stuff like the Vikings TV show and AC Valhalla celebrate. Being a Northman means a hard life of being manipulated by forces that exist around you and before you came along.
There's a part during the funeral sequence where a holy man utters lines in ancient Norse, and I recognized some of them as a quote from the Hávamál.
One translation of the whole section reads like this:
'Cattle die and kinsmen die,
thyself too soon must die,
but one thing never, I ween, will die, --
fair fame of one who has earned.Cattle die and kinsmen die,
thyself too soon must die,
but one thing never, I ween, will die, --
the doom on each one dead.'You could argue, and probably successfully, that the Northman is not a well balanced drama or action film. That it doesn't live up to the idealistic tones of Gladiator or King Arthur or The Last Samurai etc. But what it does well is showcase its source material with very little artistic license.