The Northman is a big steaming pile of dogshit! Even calling it dogshit is insulting to dogshit! At least that can fertilize the lawn. This movie costs anywhere between $70-90 million and didn’t even break even. Maybe it’s because Universal and Focus Features tried their damnedest to portray it as a Braveheart meets Conan the Barbarian flick.
It isn’t. It makes The Green Knight look like Braveheart. I’m almost certain Robert Eggers, the director of Northman is in a competition with David Lowery, the director of Knight, as well as Ari Aster, the director of Midsommar to see who can make the most ludricously off-the-wall piece of garbage disguised as an art house movie that the critics will rant and rave about. Eventually, one will stand up and say, “What is this shit?!”
The moviegoers sure did. I feel sorry for people who went to this fucking piece of navel lint in a dead person’s corpse expecting to see an action/adventure movie only to see Willem Dafoe and Ethan Hawke crawl around on the ground farting and belching. At least Hawke’s character, King Aurvandill War-Raven gets killed off early so we don’t get to watch his Richard Linklater-approved overacting that’s become most of his work. Dafoe plays Heimir the Fool. What this fucking scene has to do with the rest of the movie? I don’t know.
Anyway, this movie is based on Amleth, a medieval Scandanavian legend, which William Shakespeare used as a basis for Hamlet. You could go watch the four hour version of Hamlet Kenneth Branagh made in 1996 and be more entertained than anything in this movie, and that includes Jack Lemmon’s notoriously bad performance. Eggers throws on the blood, guts, and gore along with scenes of women being raped in the mud. And one scene that is supposed to be an homage to Come and See, Vikings throw screaming kids into a hut and set it on fire. This might have been disturbing if the fire didn’t look like the worst CGI that’s a step-up from The Asylum movies.
I’m pretty sure there were walk-outs. Not since Hobo With a Shotgun has a film director just said, “Fuck it! Let’s have people kill each other and hoot and holler for two hours” I guess Eggers who also did The Witch and The Lighthouse saw this as his first big break for a major studio. Those two movies were distributed by A24, which probably would distribute Andy Warhol’s Sleep if they could. But Universal released this and I’m guessing the executives decided to cut their losses. Not even the teaser movie posters had the title on them. I don’t blame them for not wanting to mention this movie’s title.
As for the titular character, Alexander Skarsgard plays Amleth and seems to just been told to show off his abs as much as he can. Skarsgard is a good actor but this movie is awful. Nicole Kidman pops up for a few brief scenes as Amleth’s mother, Queen Gudrun. If you wanted to see Anya Taylor-Joy nude, there’s that. And Bjork appears somewhere.
To be honest, I lost a lot of interest in this movie and just kept it on. I stopped watching it at least twice and after the 90ish minute mark, I just gave up and didn’t return to it. There was no reason to continue to watch it. I studied Hamlet not once, not twice, but thrice in my senior high school English class, theater appreciation class and English composition class, both in college. I already know what happens there. I’ve even seen The Lion King, both versions, and Doug and Bob McKenzie’s Strange Brew. I realized I didn’t need to spend one minute longer watching this movie.
And I’m only writing this to strongly advise you not to watch it. It’s not what you probably think it is.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 