Eggers’ films tend to play on a different, more self-conscious level, where audiences’ pleasure comes as much from atmosphere and all-around weirdness as it does from deranged narratives that, in retrospect, are destined to have played out exactly as they did. Over the course of a portentous 137 minutes, Amleth will dutifully avenge his father, “save” his mother and face off against Fjölnir, but none of it makes even a fraction of the emotional impact we’d expect from even the crassest sword-and-sandal movie. In most respects, Eggers is a unique artist with strong, singular ideas of how to script, stage and pace his films, and while “The Northman” is nothing if not a signature addition to a most original oeuvre - no one but Eggers would or could have reimagined “Hamlet” thus - it lacks the element of surprise that made “The Witch” and “The Lighthouse” feel like instant classics. This mantra is practically all the plot “The Northman” offers, skipping forward across the years that many would find most compelling - when this tender child acquires the skills of strength and mind that make him capable of facing off against his uncle, who has taken Amleth’s mother, Gudrún (Nicole Kidman, blazing with unrivaled fury), as his queen. Upon exiting the trippy ritual, father and son are confronted by half-brother Fjölnir (Claes Bang), who relieves the king of his crown, and the head to which it is attached, then orders the same fate for his son, who escapes, repeating the words, “I will avenge you, Father. “You are dogs who wish to become men,” growls the fool (Willem Dafoe), though Amleth’s animal instincts will not reveal themselves until much later. The story is simple - too simple, alas: Puny prince Amleth (played as a boy by Oscar Novak) eagerly welcomes his father, Viking king Aurvandil (Ethan Hawke), back from battle, undergoing an initiation ceremony that will set him on course to rule the tribe one day. And so, this scion of art-house royalty has much to prove in a starring role that borrows heavily from “Gladiator” and pretty much every Mel Gibson movie (but mostly “Braveheart”). Though he’s bulked up significantly since his comparably physical turn in 2016’s largely unnecessary “The Legend of Tarzan,” muscles only go so far to compensate for the strange emptiness behind young Skarsgård’s eyes. Alexander’s as handsome a star as Sweden has produced, but sorely lacks the charisma to carry a movie of this scale - rumored to have cost $90 million. That it’s ultimately rather dull and hardly any fun is almost beside the point.īlame that largely on Alexander Skarsgård, son of towering European talent Stellan (“Breaking the Waves”). Teaming with local novelist Sjón, Eggers - a visionary director with a preternatural interest in history, as evidenced by his rigorously detail-oriented horror movies “The Witch” and “The Lighthouse” - also draws from the region’s rich folklore, looking to the sagas of Iceland, as well as the same Scandinavian legend that inspired Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” to mount the classiest Vikesploitation epic you can imagine, complete with a doomsday Björk cameo. Iceland plays itself in Robert Eggers’ “ The Northman,” a brutal tale of 10th-century Viking revenge that makes evocative use of far more than just the scenery to be found in this stunning Nordic outpost. Nowhere else on Earth looks like Iceland, which is why so many productions over the past decade - from “Interstellar” and “Oblivion” to “Game of Thrones” and “Thor” - have used its peerless primordial terrain to represent alternate dimensions and far-off planets. Fields glow kryptonite green against volcanic black soil, while not-so-distant mountains smoke and spew hot red lava above the heads of hardy sheep.
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