Rhapsodies

This week I decided to have some fun and watch some films I had heard about for some time about Viking adventures. ( I briefly considered calling it Viking Fantasy but while one of the films definitely was, the other one was just vague enough I figured I’d play it safe.)

The first on my list, Valhalla rising, by Nicolas Winding Refn, was one that several of my friends spoke highly of starting Mads Mikkelsen.(Mainly because it was so different from Mikkelsen roles I’d seen.)

Mikkelsen plays an unnamed mute thrall called One-Eye by the boy who looks after him.. He is forced by his masters to fight other thralls to the death. (In fact he such a good fighter one has to wonder how the Vikings caught him in the first place.) He eventually escapes killing all of his captors. Into contact with a band of Christian Vikings. They are on a crusade to reach the holy land and invite One-Eye and the boy, who has accompanied him, to come with them. Rather than reach the holy land, they sail into a mysterious fog bank and find themselves in a mysterious wooded land. (Which eventually is revealed to be North America.) There they have to find their way, while all the time they are being watched.

This is a very beautiful film the explosive violence contrasting marvelously with the long silence and the restrained palette of the look of it.

The next film on my list, the 13th warrior, directed by John McTiernan, named after the book of the same name by Michael Crichton (when it’s not called by its original name, Eaters of the Dead) tells the story of real-life Arab poet Ahmad ibn Fadlan, played by Antonio Banderas, who is sent on a diplomatic mission to contact northern barbarians. He and his companions meet up with a band of Vikings on the Volga river. While he is there, an emissary comes to call the king of the band, Buliwyf to help their lord fight monsters who killing them Ahmad, is is drafted as the 13th warrior of the band, and forced to go and join the Vikings to fight the mysterious and dreaded ‘Wendol’ who are later revealed to be the last remaining Neandertals in the world surviving til the 10^th century. Can anybody any of our heroes survive let alone defeat the enemy?.

This was mostly a loyal adaptation of the original book with an excellent performance from Banderas. The rest of the performances were relatively flat. The action was good. The Wendol themselves could have been done a better done. But for it was a fun watch.