Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Excellent but underrated film

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

Valhalla Rising is one of my favorite films. That said, it definitely isn't for everyone. You have to be in a certain mood to enjoy and appreciate it. Anyone who goes into it expecting classical Hollywood cinema storytelling, or your typical action film, will be disappointed. This is not that by any stretch of the imagination. Personally, I think it is a beautiful work of art. It is mystical, mysterious, intriguing, challenging, and thought-provoking. You may love it, hate it, or simply be confused by it. It is unique. Yet, I have watched it several times and have enjoyed it each time. There is something about it that I find mesmerizing. It is written and directed by Nicholas Winding Refn. You might be familiar with his style if you have seen the film Drive. Mads Mikkelson is one of my favorite actors, and believe me, pulling off a wonderful acting performance while never saying a word is harder than you might think. Yet, I found his character utterly captivating. On one hand there is a vicious violent realism to the film, but it is mixed in with religion, history, and mysticism. There is a certain minimalism to the film, long quiet shots, and yet there is depth, color, and symbolic meaning as well. I appreciated the somber tone, the dark lighting, contrasted with the eventual lush beauty yet bubbling fear and violence behind the new world the explorers encounter later in the film. Spoilers from here on:On one level, the film is about a one-eyed slave who battles in fights to the death for the amusement and gambling purposes for his Norse owners, his quest for freedom, his travels with a young boy, who becomes somewhat of a friend, communicator/translator, and eventually someone whom One-Eye seeks to protect in their travels together with their new-found freedom. Who are they? Where are they from? Where do they want to go? Who do they want to be? Do they even know? Either way, clearly this is a violent brutal world. All this man has known or understands about this world is violence. It is all he expects, and he is prepared to participate if necessary. I found this film to be both a religious allegory, and a statement about humans in an era of the Crusades. Several worlds, cultures, and religions collide in this human drama. We have the Vikings and their Norse religion, the crusading Christians, and eventually the Natives of what appears to be the Americas. The Viking world is under attack and becoming converted by the emerging Christian world, which threatens to supplant it. One-eye and his young friend are recruited by Christians on a quest to conquer the Holy Land, and to convert heathens. The one-eyed main character has premonitions of the future, and is unbeatable in battle. This appears to be an allusion to the Norse god Odin. The Christians aren't so sure about him, and at first want to kill him, but decide that they are more interested in bringing him along with them, given his reputation for fighting prowess. He might be of service. One-eye encounters different kinds of Christians. Some genuinely want to teach the true meaning of Christianity. One-eye is informed that Christianity is a religion of love, forgiveness, and belief in the soul. Yet, several members of the group clearly want to force conversion on others through violence. Ultimately, several of the Christians are no different than the Norsemen in this world - violent conquerors, and at times ignorant, narrow-minded, and irrational in their beliefs. Christianity was the mere façade several used as a basis for conquest and personal gain. Others are blind in their total genuine faith, but often misguided, at times to their detriment. When the travelers go off course and wind up in what appears to be the Americas, the Christians encounter a new culture - the Native Americans, whom the leader of the group intends to convert. But the natives are not too thrilled with these visitors' presence, and more violence ensues. Huge spoiler alert:Ultimately, One-Eye, despite his tremendous fighting prowess, does not put up a fight against the Natives, and sacrifices himself voluntarily, seemingly as a way of protecting the boy from angering or incurring further wrath from the natives, and appeasing them. I saw this as the culmination and intersection of the worlds he had encountered - the Norse and the Christian. He is a great warrior who has foreseen his death, but he also embraces it, decides not to fight and kill when he could have done so, and like Jesus, voluntarily allows himself to be killed as a sacrifice. In doing so, he has justified his entry into heaven, if not Valhalla.

RELEASED IN 2009 and directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, "Valhalla Rising" takes place in the 11th century where a one-eyed mute thrall (Mads Mikkelsen) obtains his freedom in the Scottish Highlands and joins a band of Viking Christians on a voyage to the Holy Land to fight in the Crusades, but the expedition doesn't go as planned. The movie definitely LOOKS and SOUNDS awesome with an ambient score reminiscent of Agalloch, but without the heavy riffing or manic drumming. It's an artsy non-blockbuster with a tone akin to "Aguirre, The Wrath of God" (1972) and "Black Robe" (1991). "Apocalypto" (2006) is a good modern comparison, although the story isn't as compelling as "Black Robe" or "Apocalypto." It has elements of "Apocalypse Now" (1979) but the thin story just isn't anywhere near as fascinating. Still, it's okay. There are some weak points, like the Viking chief saying "It's a river" when this would've been obvious about an hour earlier when the mist first cleared (aduh). I'm sure the director would chalk it up to artistic license. Another issue is that the film is slow with not enough events to justify its runtime. As such, we get needlessly drawn-out scenes like the discovery of fresh water (which was obvious from the get-go of the sequence). The whole episode could've been done in a third of the time given.THE MOVIE RUNS 1 hour, 33 minutes and was shot in Scotland. WRITERS: Refn, Roy Jacobsen and Matthew Read.GRADE: BINTERPRETATION ***SPOILER ALERT*** (Don't read further unless you've seen the movie).The silent One-Eye is the incarnation of Odin. He is invincible and holds the power to see the future. He disdains the Christian Vikings who've usurped his influence over his people. He tests many in battle to see if they're worthy, but finds none. Nevertheless, he sullenly sees his people off to their new (holy) land, America, where Scandinavians were the third most numerous immigrants. The Boy is a type of Thor, his son, who will sort of replace him in America once the grim god ironically sacrifices himself à la Jesus Christ.

I went into this movie with the expectation of watching something slow, vaguely philosophical, but overall visually interesting and stylized. That's basically how Valhalla Rising tends to be described. While the first predictions were definitely quickly confirmed, it became also rapidly apparent that this film isn't beautifully shot at all- but rather has an extremely garish, digital amateur-look.This is the main reason I'm writing a review, by the way. You see, most people criticizing this movie complain about how boring and vacuous it is. Now, while I find myself agreeing with their sentiment, I also want to add: Valhalla Rising is not a case of "style over substance", as one prominent review here claims and many others echo. In my opinion, it is rather the absence of both.I mentioned my expectations about this movie at the beginning, because even though I know many people consider it to be "slow and boring", a mere exercise in cinematographic style, in my opinion "style" done well, can lend a lot of substance to a film. The extremely sparse dialogue and slow pacing work very well in something like 2001 for example, or to a lesser degree, There Will Be Blood or The Master.This movie though, is simply ugly. Yes, it was filmed on a low budget, but I feel like some of the shots an amateur could have done better on a modestly priced DSLR. I read that the director, Refn, is colorblind and that's his excuse to crush all the blacks and throw simply gross looking filters on badly looking footage to create an amateurish looking mess that should embarrass a youtube vlogger. A few other questionable "stylistic" choices: The constant shaky cam did nothing to enhance the scenes and compositions and just additionally gave the whole production a feel of unpreparedness and it being the result of arbitrary artistic choices. During the entire part shot "on the boat" I felt like I was watching a school-play being filmed, where a bunch of mediocre actors sat on some Viking-ship museum's exhibit placed on a stage with the fog machine cranked up to the maximum and cheesy orange light filtering through. Sound effects seemed to be ripped off youtube and weren't always synced well. Horrid "blood spatter" effects were just thrown onto the footage - seriously, like someone googled "blood stain", took the first .png result and superimposed it over the footage.The reason I'm going on and on about this is not to prove what an observant clever viewer I am, but to show that this movie being called a "visual feast/spectacle" is a bizarre, misguided rumor. This movie looks like sh*t, almost shot for shot. Which completely makes any sort of immersion impossible if you're someone who notices such things.But the visual narrative is the only thing this movie has going for itself, seeing, as you've probably read in many places, that it has almost no dialogue or straightforward plot-motivation for its cast of indistinct characters.So, sadly, I got absolutely nothing out of this movie. The reason I'm giving it more than 1 star is that I very much respect a director pursing his vision. It's no easy feat to make any movie, especially one as unconventional and hard to digest like this. But my respect is limited,seeing that it just fails in many regards that could have been done much better, even with the limited budget it had.

I would hazard a statement and say that Valhalla Rising is Nicolas Winding Refn's most inaccessible film, to wider audiences. Despite the bleak, impenetrable horror of Fear X and the repulsive, Freudian filth of Only God Forgives, there's just something so bare and primordial about Valhalla, a skeletal narrative that serves as a haunted shell for a story that is essentially the 'anti story', an acrid, backwards battle poem existing in a vacuum of space where genre tropes should be at play, and are mournfully absent. A lot of films set in ancient times just feel the need to give the proceedings a modern flourish, adding humour, bravery and many elements we identify with and are used to seeing. The reality is those times were probably not like that at all, and resembled a level of anthropological alienation that would confuse us. Refn casts exactly that kind of cloak over his film here, bringing us a dark, hollow world where primitive despair swirls about in the mists of the British Isles and the ocean far beyond. Refn is first and foremost concerned with his protagonists, striving to make them unique and challenging. The meek, confused griever playing detective (John Turturro in Fear X), the lonely, pent up vigilante (Ryan Gosling in Drive) and the bawdy, childish, anarchic brawling bull in a China shop (Tom Hardy in Bronson) were endlessly fascinating, but here he takes it a step further into the overgrown netherworld of the human psyche. His outlet of exploration is a mute, feral Scandinavian warrior, simply called One Eye (Mads Mikkelsen), who is ready to inflict throat ripping, bone snapping carnage at the drop of a hat. This isn't someone who kills for his own gain or goals though, and it's in that characteristic that One Eye is different from every other lead in Refn's tales. All the rest were forceful, extremely aware beings who were out to achieve clear cut goals, even if one of them was just to create as much self destructive chaos as possible. One Eye is a slave, someone's property, and lays down the carnage hammer only when instructed to by his Saxon owners. This unfolds in a jarring opening act that you'll need a strong stomach to fight through. The violence is scarily realistic and lands with the same sickening thud that skulls make when Mikkelsen bashes them on the jagged outcroppings of rocks which populate this austere terrain. As two warring clans squabble about who deserves sovereignty over One Eye's terrifying talents, circumstances lead to his departure from the moors of Britain, on a boat captained by a Scottish warlord (the exceptional Gary Lewis) and with the companionship of a mysterious young boy (Maarten Stevenson). The boat drifts in a lilting trance for miles on end, seemingly headed nowhere, and it's here that Refn let's both his characters and audience off the leash and sends us headlong into the crushing blackness of a narrative that is maddeningly impossible to decipher. To try and think it out is to fail right off the bat; One must let this type of story wash over you and discern it's meaning using the unconscious modes of thought that human beings have sadly forgotten amidst a flurry of science, reason and technology. The voyage across this sea is one out of time, out of mind and beyond rationality, and the land that lays at the far end of the crimson sunrise is one even more foreboding and secretive than the rocks they left behind. Encounters with a strange tribe, moody passages of time where One Eye seems to drift between dimensions of thought and animalistic contemplation, dimly perceived exchanges of dialogue that seem lost and misplaced among the pressing gloom, it all flows by like the fog on the water, making sense as an element existing in it's place in nature, but unable to be reconciled by our minds, which always need to have the safety net of a "why" to break the great fall of the unknown. Sometimes there's no explaining, no categorizing, because to do so is arrogant. Sometimes it's just naked perception and acceptance, if you can bring yourself to that place. Refn can, and what's more, he can create such feelings, which is what makes him so important as an artist. He understands the uncharted places on the territory of human experience, waiting to be mapped out like the strange new world One Eye and the boy visit, a world which may as well be a different planet to their eyes. It's in this inaccessibility that he gives us what, although is certainly not his most enjoyable or commercially viable film, is definitely the one that says the most, if you possess and are willing to use the tools necessary to experience it. Difficult. Psychological. Troubling. Hypnotic. Beautiful. Masterpiece.