DVD review: Valhalla Rising

A group of Vikings en route to the holy land get lost in a spectacular way, carnage ensues.

Normally I eschew artsy movies because I don’t want to get myself into that sort of self pretentious affair with long stares, loong backgrounds shots, looong silences… you know them. Lately a bunch of good auteur, and a dearth of good stuff in the mainstream, drove me to reconsider my stance and try more indi stuff.

But then we saw this one which is exactly the incredibly boring stuff that I can’t bear. On paper it should have been good, it good Vikings, brutal fights, gorgeous Scottish vistas but the writer/director Nicholas Winding Refn manages to squander all of this.

Yes the fights are nicely choreographed and extremely bloody but they are of the “Blink and you’ll miss it” variety, added together they amount to no more than a couple of minutes for the whole film.

The vistas are also gorgeous but we practically never see them because for the majority of the movie everything is shrouded in a thick mist. Even I can appreciate the symbolism and visual appeal of it but after an hour we are really overtaxing our patience.

All this stuff would have been secondary if the story was up the par but this is actually the worst part. The main lead is a mute and the other Vikings instead of talking more to make up for his silence they actually sit there brooding most of the times. So the whole movie is about a bunch of people rarely talking and when they talk they do it in such a sloooow way. Probably it should give them more gravitas but it only makes the poor spectator sleepier.

Moreover when they do something, because eventually after a lot of brooding they slooowly do something, what they do is not very significative and doesn’t make a lot of sense. There are nicely flashes of the prophetic visions of “One eye”, the main lead, but it all just remains there, undeveloped.

I know that I should have been taken by the dream like atmosphere but this movie is the factual demonstration that the best atmosphere in the world is not enough. We need stuff to happen for a story to be enjoyable.