Sure, I’m in.
It’s Eggers so I’m sure it’s not as straightforward as the trailer seems to make it, but I was struck by how much it appears to be Assassin’s Creed Valhalla’s story - which is a pretty bog-standard revenge setup. I mean Conan the Barbarian did the same thing essentially.
I hate dumb fake runes in titles almost as much as I hate fake Cyrillic.
I know this doesn’t even make sense as a joke if you think about it for half a second, but I will be mentally referring to this film as The Wiking.
I was thinking the same thing the whole time I watched the trailer.
Even set in Cimmeria.
Someone watched Vinland Saga.
I guess it’s Eggers’ version of the Amleth tale which is the supposed historical inspiration for Hamlet, but the trailer just makes it seem so crazy pedestrian action movie revenge tale. It’s kinda nutty and I’m fascinated.
Yup. Same feel here.
That said, Nicole Kidman and Willem Dafoe and a muscular protagonist looking to overcome a king and take the throne which is rightfully his make me think of Aquaman as well.
Valhalla Rising is a steep bar to climb for crazy viking movie, IMO. We shall see.
This probably belongs in the WTF thread:
(Not this tweet, but what this tweet is reacting to)
That seems like some seriously reverse-engineered outrage there.
I’m certainly not an expert on the subject, but five minutes of Googling tells me the rune simply represents the “o” sound. That seems like a pretty good reason to use it as the “o” in Northman. A version with serifs was briefly coopted by the Nazis and then more recently a version without was coopted by the National Socialist Movement.
To make the jump from that to “Robert Eggers is secretly a Nazi who’s trying to appeal to racists by sneaking white supremacist symbolism into his movie titles” is pretty far out there.
There is a wing of liberals that’s against anything Viking right now specifically because white supremacists have latched onto Norse symbols. It’s dumb.
The mistake all of you made was paying any attention to Twitter.
I see Anya Taylor-Joy reprises her role.
Just got back and YOW, this movie is a lot.
It’s a straight-forward revenge saga but with loads of mysticism woven throughout. Every aspect of the craft is exacting and just as extraordinary as you’d expect, including the cast who all commit wholeheartedly. It gets pretty wild!
I loved Eggers’ style in The Witch, then I appreciated it in The Lighthouse. I’m not sure it translates all that well to the big budget action scenes in The Northman. As he says in that New Yorker piece, Eggers and co. don’t do coverage. I found myself aware that I was watching fight choreography a bit too often (kind of like with 1917) but this isn’t a major knock against the film. I think it’s more of a personal taste thing. Still, I think these kinds of scenes thrive on editing!
I want to see it with subtitles. I find I really want/need to read the dialogue in all his films to fully appreciate it. (And sometimes to hear or comprehend it.)
Northman was intense. I loved it. Think it may be too hard to interpret and even hear dialogue for a lot of people. Exactly what I wanted and needed tho. Best Hamlet evar :)
The Northman didn’t really work for me me. Like in The Witch and The Lighthouse Eggers fully evokes the historical distance to his characters, their setting and psychology, but the authenticity so gained is kind of lost here to a story that hews too closely to the conventions of its mythology. It’s the sort of story that would be told in the movie’s setting, but it’s a fantasy story told in a movie that tries to show things as they really were. In all three movies Eggers incorporates elements of the fantastic because that’s how his characters’ minds work, but in the previous films the audience wasn’t asked to share in the suspension of disbelief.