"We're God's own soldiers, heading for Jerusalem to reconquer the holy land.."
Valhalla Rising is the third Nicolas Winding Refn film to be up for review here on my blog, and based on what I had heard about the movie prior to seeing it, I didn't have very high hopes all. As it so often is the case in these situations though, Valhalla Rising proved to be far better than the hype had let me to believe, and I was pleasantly surprised to find myself feeling both amazed and emotionally battered once the credits started rolling. I do realize that this movie won't do the same thing for everyone else though, seeing as it is very artsy and "out there" in terms of storytelling and narrative format, and I'm pretty sure that most of the people who's seen the movie will disagree with me on most of my opinions about it. If you do happen to be a fan of art-house movies that don't hesitate to throw caution to the wind though, Valhalla Rising will be right up your alley.
The movie takes place in 1000 AD, in the cold, windswept and desolate parts of Northern Scotland, where One Eye, a mute warrior slave of superhuman strength who's lost an eye in battle, spends his days struggling to survive the harsh treatment of his captor, a Norse chieftain called Barde. One Eye is troubled by hellish visions of sacrifice and punishment, and with the help of a slave boy called Are, he escapes his captors and sets out on a journey to find himself and to discover the origins of his visions. The two of them soon meet and team up with a band of christian crusaders who are on their way to "God's holy lands", and One Eye's eventual influence on this group of people and their influence on him is one of the many weirdly trippy plot devices that Nicolas Winding Refn uses to tell this fascinations story of faith, violence and religion.
I have to admit that I didn't fully understand this movie from my one viewing of it, but I'm also pretty sure that that's exactly what Refn wanted. Valhalla Rising is a very metaphorical and thematically rich piece of cinema, and there's a lot of ways to interpret the different events and occurrences that take place during its runtime; a fact that's sure to turn a lot of viewers off very quickly. The mood and the style of the film reminded me a lot of some of David Lynch's and Terrence Malick's work, and especially the very little amount of dialogue made me think of movies such as Eraserhead and The Tree of Life. I read somewhere that the movie doesn't have more than 140 lines of actual dialogue, and I honestly think that this is one of Valhalla Rising's greatest strengths. When there's no voices to be heard, a lot of the more subtle and discrete elements become much clearer, which in turn means that Peter Kyed's mesmerizing score and Morten Søborg's jaw-dropping cinematography becomes much more apparent. This lack of spoken explanation also allows for a much more personal and original experience, and it added a whole lot to my over all experience of watching the movie.
In terms of Valhalla Rising's actual story, there isn't really that much to talk about. I watched the movie with my mother and my stepdad, and even though I enjoyed it way more than they did, I do understand why they didn't like the way in which nothing seemed to happen. It's a very original movie with a lot of blinding visuals and profound ideas, but its lack of story arch and graspable narrative did make it kinda hard to watch at times. It never got to a point at witch I wanted the movie to end, far from it actually, but I would have liked it to have had a little more structure or something to actually grab onto and hold firmly in your hand, if you understand what I mean. I realize that art isn't always easy to behold and understand, but I have to admit that there does come a time where staring at starving and depressed vikings on a boat for twenty minutes in a row becomes a little dull and repetitive.
Valhalla Rising raises a lot of questions about religion, spirituality and imperialism, and my guess is that these aspects and their meanings are the most important ones to take away from the movie. Both the Christians and the Norse people in the film are depicted as being barbaric, violent, primitive and greedy, and the way in which the movie concludes makes it seem as if all the negative things that has happened are a direct result of religious and especially imperialistic disputes. One Eye and Are, the mistreated slave and the homeless child, appear to be the only people in the entire world who don't judge other men on their religious beliefs and on the strength of their arm, and even though I'm not exactly sure what this is supposed to mean or symbolize, watching the two of them be as different from the rest of the men they're travelling with is strangely compelling and intriguing. I realize that this description probably doesn't make much sense for people who hasn't seen the movie, but explaining exactly what it is I felt when the film ended without spoiling some of the more jaw dropping elements of the spiritual themes is very hard to do.
In the end, I have to admit that Valhalla Rising is one of the most strangely compelling movies I've seen in a while, even though it doesn't have much of a narrative structure at all. Its visuals are nothing short of stunning, the score is beautifully haunting, the central performance from Mads Mikkelsen is as strong as it possibly can be be considering the fact that he has no lines of dialogue whatsoever, and the spiritual and atmospherical themes are very well handled and executed. It's a very niche movie with an even more niche target audience, and I'd be surprised if more than one out of every ten people who see it will like it, simply because of how "out there" and artsy it really is. It's not a movie that your'e going to watch several times in a row, not even if you loved it, which is the main reason why it doesn't qualify for the rating of "worth buying on BluRay". That being said, Nicolas Winding Refn does manage to create a surreal and trippy atmosphere throughout the entire movie that I'd be happy to experience again sometime down the line, and thus, Valhalla Rising has earned my seal of approval. (4/6)
Valhalla Rising IMDb page here
Valhalla Rising trailer here
No comments:
Post a Comment