I mean, lets start with the above, it seems pretty gritty to me (especially if its been placed right next to Centurion). This looks like a movie that will make a Saturday night of light and bloody viewing, right?
And the synopsis: "1000 AD, for years, One Eye, a mute warrior of supernatural strength, has been held prisoner by the Norse chieftain Barde. Aided by Are, a boy slave, One Eye slays his captor and together he and Are escape, beginning a journey into the heart of darkness. On their flight, One Eye and Are board a Viking vessel, but the ship is soon engulfed by an endless fog that clears only as the crew sights an unknown land. As the new world reveals its secrets and the Vikings confront their terrible and bloody fate, One Eye discovers his true self"
Vikings, slavery, escapes, new world, terrible and bloody fate... sounds like proper Saturday night entertainment, no?
Well, no, not entertaining, unless that the first movie that comes to mind if I say "Western" is Dead Man. Dont get me wrong, Jim Jarmusch did a beautiful job with that film, but lets be honest and admit that John Wayne, Sergio Leone and even Young Guns came way ahead on the list.
This is the kind of movie only a hipster or art house fanatic would love: its slow, the dialogues are "deep" and the action is so sparse that someone picking his nose looks like ultraviolence. But seriously, the acting is terrible, the plotting non-existent; its a waste of celluloid. This is the kind of movie a writer would put out if he thought himself too smart for more regular fare; in fact this is exactly what happened, making a "different spin" kind of junk heap, full of pointless shots and silent scenes.
That this movie get compared to Herzog's Aguirre, The Wrath Of God, or to Alexandro Jodorowsky just shows how much he'd want to be cool, or talented. At best this might have made a decent short film, a good twenty-thirty minutes of existential gore, but no, its just drawn out boredom. You keep expecting that at some point something will happen, but at best somebody does something hare brained and gets killed. In the reviews I've browsed there's the constant mention of the brutality and violence in the film; its the most interesting parts of the movie, its would have benefited from quite a bit more of it. It makes the whole thing a lot less tedious.
Another recurring theme is how you shouldn't expect video game action, and that this is a more intelligent sort of movie... no, its just a very boring, ill crafted, empty take on spiritual journey. Not surprisingly, this movie seems backed up by the IFC, a channel I stopped watching a few years back when they kept playing incredibly pretentious films that bored me to tears. This is not a smart spiritual journey into the heart of the human soul, its ninety-three minutes of nothingness, sprinkled with some pseudo-existential monologue (not really any dialogue to speak of), but mostly long shots of barren terrain, most likely because it cost nothing and required no technical skills to achieve.
If that movie has a positive, then it'd be the soundtrack. Very atmospheric, alien, brooding, this said more than any character did at any time in his sad flick. Unfortunately, its not good enough to waste your time with this piece of junk, watch Dead Man, or any other Jim Jarmusch film instead. See, the sad thing is that Dead Man, the film that Refn is ripping off in this sad piece, is far superior, because the script, the acting, the directing, everything is better really, and it was done on nearly the same budget.
Done waste your time with this film, its really a bad marketing job that will put you to sleep.
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