The Northman
Prince Amleth is on the verge of becoming a man when his father is brutally murdered by his uncle, who kidnaps the boy's mother. Two decades later, Amleth is now a Viking who's on a mission to save his mother, kill his uncle and avenge his father.
- Released: 2022-04-07
- Runtime: 137 minutes
- Genre: Action, Drama, History
- Stars: Alexander Skarsgård, Anya Taylor-Joy, Claes Bang, Nicole Kidman, Ethan Hawke, Björk, Willem Dafoe, Ralph Ineson, Kate Dickie, Gustav Lindh, Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson, Murray McArthur, Ian Gerard Whyte, James Yates, Olwen Fouéré, Edgar Abram, Rebecca Ineson, Eric Higgins, Kevin Horsham, Jack Gassmann, Tadhg Murphy, Ingvar Sigurdsson, Elliott Rose, Jonas Lorentzen, Ísadóra Bjarkardóttir Barney, Jon Campling, Magne Osnes, James Harper-Jones, Katie Pattinson, Luca Evans, Seamus O'Hara, Chris Finlayson, Scott Sinclair, Gareth Parker, Eldar Skar, Phill Martin, Oscar Novak, Jack Walsh, Ian Whyte, Andrea O’Neill, Nille Glæsel, Ineta Sliuzaite, Finn Lafferty, Helen Roche, Faoileann Cunningham, Mark Fitzgerald, Gavin Peden, Joel Hicks, Matt Symonds, Thomas Harper-Jones, Sheila Fitton, Lily Bird, Sunil Beniwal, Michael McGeown, Peter Vamos
- Director: Robert Eggers
Comments
- deadbydawn18 - 8 June 2024
For Film Nerds with Testosterone
A lot of these reviews seem to say that this is either a dull, long and drawn out story or a a violent filled Viking slaughter movie- which it kind of is the latter but I think it's much deeper and creative than that. If you were to compare to a "bro" like film like 300... there is much more substance and depth in this film. Nothing cheesy about it either. This movie is based of the ancient story that drove Shakespeare to write Hamlet. Amazing casting, a great story, top notch cinematography and great amazing music supervisors that definitely did their thing here.
By the end, you'll be wanting to go and do whatever it takes to avenge a loved one. Really... you'll actually want to battle someone in the old ways.
Honestly to me, 10/10. - alcosta-197-774442 - 25 April 2024
Blood soaked modern rendition of macbeth + hamlet
This is just a.blood soaked modern rendition of macbeth + hamlet
Boring, pointless. Great photography, customes, and historically well made
The rest, just a ripoff of shakespeare
This is just a.blood soaked modern rendition of macbeth + hamlet
Boring, pointless. Great photography, customes, and historically well made
The rest, just a ripoff of shakespeare
This is just a.blood soaked modern rendition of macbeth + hamlet
Boring, pointless. Great photography, customes, and historically well made
The rest, just a ripoff of shakespeare
This is just a.blood soaked modern rendition of macbeth + hamlet
Boring, pointless. Great photography, customes, and historically well made
The rest, just a ripoff of shakespeare. - callumdignan - 24 March 2024
Eggers weakest film.
Was honestly excited to watch this film as I am huge fan of "the witch" and "the lighthouse". However I have only now watched it because a friend of mine who loves all of Eggers other films as well went to see it and told me it's not worth watching in cinema and to wait until it comes to streaming. I was surprised and still intended to watch but wound up waiting for the home release. Now I understand what he meant and am glad I didn't watch in the cinema.
To start, obviously the visuals are fantastic, the scenery is great, the acting is top notch, the music is incredible and the tone that Eggers creates is all there. He has an incredible talent for bringing different time periods to life with authentic dialogue and themes. Everything was there to make this another potential cult classic to add to his filmography. However there is an enormous gaping hole of a problem with this film that just lost me completely about half way through... The screenplay.
To keep this spoiler free i will be as vague as possible. The first act kept me engaged, showing the life of the main character and the moments that lead him to the man he would become. We flash forward to where he is now and the plot begins to kick in with a fantasticly directed action scene but as soon as he finds out what his family member is doing now and where he must go, the story becomes unbelievably tedious.
This film does have action don't get me wrong but this is not by any means an action film. Once he travels to the location of where he needs to go and act 2 kicks in, the plot feels like it moves at an absolute snails pace. I'd find myself checking how far I am into the film and checking the time to see how long I've got left because I kept waiting for something to happen. Later on in the film it picks up a bit but not by much and definitely not enough to capture the intrigue I had at the beginning of the film. It had already lost my attention.
As I mentioned earlier the dialogue is great and true to the time period however the substance is barely there and not enough to hold my interest. The film is just over 2 hours long but began to feel like 3 or even 4 because everything feels like it slows right down especially with what the main character is trying to accomplish and how quickly it could realistically be done. There are elements of the script that basically tell you the reason the story can't move along quicker is because of fortunes and prophecies etc etc, but not only does that just wind up feeling like an excuse to long the film out but because you then know how things need to play out and what is supposed to happen you feel like you're just sat around waiting for this thing to come around.
Robert Eggers two previous films "the witch" and "the lighthouse" both had the benefit of not only being lower budget but also having a better sense of what you're in for going into the film. They were both mostly horror films that build off tension and suspense which is what made them so great along with all the other details that elevated them to what they were. This film has all those elements too however they are not as prevalent because this film isn't supposed to be like those ones. It was presented as a big budget viking action flick. It is not. It starts off that way which is what grabs your attention immediately and pulls you in but then the actual film starts. You're left waiting around for an hour and a half for things you've already been told will happen... well... to happen.
There are moments that bring you back in a bit don't get me wrong but they are all minor story beats that grab your interest for a moment and then we continue back to the snooze fest. If we didn't have the big act 1 and this film was promoted as it actually is, a period piece with moments of action and gore every now and then, I imagine it would have been recieved a lot better. This film just didn't pick a lane. Big high budget epic? Nowhere near enough in the 2nd and 3rd acts. Standard Eggers suspense/horror? Again, nowhere near enough to bring it to those heights.
Genuinely really disappointed. I was rooting for this film and again the first act pulled me in and set the film up to be this grand epic but instead of a major revenge plot that kicks off and takes us down all kinds of different and exciting avenues we then go and spend the rest of the film on a farm essentially playing hide and seek with the odd trippy nordic vision every now and then.
Literally could have changed nothing in the first act but switched up where the rest of the films leads, kept the same ending and it could have been one of the greats but instead we got this. Still a good film and worth the watch for the acting, visuals, music, etc again literally everything else is fantastic but the plot basically feels like it grinds to a halt. Despite everything I've mentioned here I still have very high hopes for Nosferatu (Eggers next film). Horror/Mystery. Perfect set up for an Eggers film.
Just to add, I do fully believe Eggers is capable of making an epic of what people expected out of this film however something went wrong here and it went from extremely enticing and interesting to wondering whether I should set an alarm in case I fell asleep.
5/10. - claudio_carvalho - 8 January 2023
Amleth's Destiny
In the end of the Nineth Century, King Aurvandil War-Raven (Ethan Hawke) returns home to his wife Queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman) and his son Amleth with many conquests. His bastard brother Fjölnir the Brotherless (Claes Bang) visits him and is welcomed by King Aurvandil. On the next morning, Fjölnir beheads his brother and sends his assassins to kill Amleth that succeeds to escape. Years later, Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård) is a strong Viking and after attacking a village, he meets the Seeress (Björk) that tells him that his destiny is to seek revenge on Fjölnir. Amleth learns that Fjölnir has lost King Aurvandil's kingdom and now he is a sheep farmer in Iceland. Now Amleth poses of slave, goes on board of a slave vessel and meets Olga of the Birch Forest (Anya Taylor-Joy), who claims to be a sorcerer. Soon they come to Fjölnir's farm and are bought as slaves. Now Amleth may plot his revenge.
"The Northman" is a story of betrayal and revenge in the period of the Vikings. The plot follows the boy Amleth until the murder of his father and then an adult seeking revenge. The film is very beautiful visually speaking, but also too long, lasting 2h 17min running time in a story of revenge. Maybe the best and cruelest moment certainly is when Gudrún discloses the truth about the murder of King Aurvandil to Amleth. My vote is seven.
Title (Brazil); "O Homem do Norte" ("The Northman") - lensayers-33294 - 4 January 2023
Noggin the Nog
Noggin the Nog (google it) with violence and faux mysticism. Can't believe anyone thought it was good. Accents varied between Irish and Punjabi. Waste of two hours. The action was realistic and the effects were good but the current trend of style over substance (Avatar syndrome) is very disturbing. Will we ever see a decent movie again? Surprise to see such vaunted actors as Nicole Kidman and Anya Taylor-Joy in a movie like this. Even my wife said she couldn't wait for it to end. Lot of dark scenes with fire blazing are pretty effective but you wonder what was the point of living in such an inhospitable and violent world. So there were no sympathetic characters only muscular maniacs. - raimorio - 30 December 2022
A Shakespearean contemplation on the nature of violence
I cannot fathom how this movie has such a low rating. I think modern people simply cannot handle a movie like this. The movie is an insanely realistic depiction of what life was like back in these times, not only in its brutality but in how people saw life as one big mystical ritual. You must understand that the stuff that people do in this movie is literally what people were doing back in the day.
However, the real gem in this picture is the journey that the main character takes from the beginning to the end, which reaches Shakespeare´s levels of drama and epicness. It is truly a great drama and a deep dive into the very essence of a person, his motives, feelings, hopes and fears. It is quite rare for a movie to get so into the core of a character and produce such deep tragedy with it.
The movie is also a brilliant contemplation on the nature of violence. People who have not been violently traumatized don´t understand that in real violence there are no heroes. This story is a pitch perfect demonstration of how it would really be, if you were to take on such a path, yet it manages to do it without downgrading or degrading the Viking mythology of Valhalla. Life back then wasn´t perfect, it was violent and insane, but in the end it made sense to them, because it had to. Valhalla was where warriors went, for it is only in Valhalla that one could be the hero nobody could be in real life.
Simply put this is one of the deepest movies of recent years. I think for many people the violence distracts them from an objective philosophical analysis of the story and what it truly offers. Or they have lost their capacity for the depths. - MOscarbradley - 22 December 2022
Like a Monty Python sketch without the laughs.
Not having been privy to the sights, sounds and smells of the royal Scandavian courts of the mid-nineth century I can't vouchsafe to the authenticity of Robert Eggers film "The Northman" but as medieval movies go few have seemed quite as 'authentic' as this one. Telling roughly the same tale as 'Hamlet' it's a grim, gory and muddy epic very typical in style to the previous films of its director and while it certainly does what it says on the tin I'd like to see Eggers try his hand at something more contemporary, (a musical-comedy perhaps?).
Ethan Hawke is the murdered king, Claes Bang the brother who slays him, Nicole Kidman, the faithless wife and Alexander Skarsgard is the prince out to revenge his father's death. It looks terrific even if the screenplay, written by Eggers and someone called simply Sjon, consists mostly of a lot of grunting and groaning and a host of very bloody killings, verging more often than not on parody, like an elongated Monty Python sketch minus the laughs.
History, no doubt, will dictate that this was what it was really like so while it is brilliant on some technical level it hardly makes for an entertaining two plus hours in the cinema and while I do admire Eggers as a filmmaker I'm beginning to wonder if he isn't something of a, in this case, three trick pony. - spsnz - 18 December 2022
Stopped watching after 30 mins
It isn't often I quit watching something I read up and chose to watch. But this movie managed to be so bad I quit after 30 mins. Stringing dramatic scene after dramatic scene doesn't create the glue a movie needs to be a cohesive story. This seemed like an American fantasising about what Vikings were like and kind of throwing in some Native American stuff - weird mix. Such a shame as I was hoping for something along the lines of the Vikings series. My partner and I both just looked at each other, shrugged and tried another 10 mins before finally giving up hope it would get any better.......... - serkancelik1994 - 10 December 2022
Well below expectation.
There are no battle scenes. It is very simple to manufacture. A movie that fell short of expectations. The shooting of the movie "Northern" was sloppy, as if it was worked with 10 people. The subject and the idea are good, but I was expecting a stronger and more crowded production. You won't lose anything if you don't watch it. The scenes are unnecessarily long and the subject variety is not processed. Yet there are too many arguments in that mythology that could be fiction. The script and direction are weak. Some of the actors played very well, while others showed very simple acting.......... - rhodashelton - 4 December 2022
One of the greatest films
I can only compare this movie to the love and experience of a great book. I say that with the upmost respect.
Every word spoken in this movie is a gift. I think the writer forwards the story in the way the characters talk about their beliefs, painting a picture that only the watcher can see in their minds eye. Then the scene changes from talking to one of fantasy and you ask yourself the question, is the character being taken to Valhalla to dine at the table of Odin. This movie whispers to the watcher, making you question what's actually happening to these characters.
The scenery and setting are absolutely magnificent. Sometimes the photography gives you the feeling of being in some sort of mythical realm even though it's our beautiful earth.
The acting is superb. Skarsgard is amazing, making me want to roar right there alongside him. I question the sanity of each and every character though. They have issues to say the least. This isn't a movie where you'll like all the characters though. Make your peace with that before you watch it or don't but check it out because it's actually a great film. Don't believe the negative reviews.
