The Northman < Conan the Barbarian < The Green Knight < Gladiator
But still not bad.
Look, I HATED Eggers’ The Witch which was ponderously boring, not at all frightening as it was billed, just downright silly at times, and impossible to take seriously. So when The Lighthouse was released I skipped on viewing despite all the accolades and awestruck reviews.
But a Viking epic of revenge that looked like it had high production values and took its content seriously without camp or tongue in cheek? I’m in.
What you get is pretty much that…Eggers knows how to craft an image and a feeling, I’ll give him that. Still have issues with fake snow though…Yes, I get that real snowflakes won’t stay and are very small, but do the fake ones really need to be like 1/2” in circumference and look like fuzzy plastic??
So the atmosphere throughout the film is excellent. We get the dirt and blood and sweat that such a film needs. Everyone is filthy (well, except the female characters). Aleksander Skarsgard is good in his role as the Northman himself. A lithe barbarian he is here. Strong but not overly bulky. Young and at the peak of male power but having suffered enough to be vulnerable to both weapon and word. Anna Taylor-Joy as the eventual female lead fills the role of lover-Valkyrie-mother with skill and is the character most investable from the audience’s perspective.
And that perhaps is one of the bigger shortcomings of the film.
Where with Conan the Barbarian you see the boy’s family killed and Conan enslaved, having to kill others just to survive or to fend off monsters or to get revenge. Here? While perhaps more accurate in terms of just what an outcast may have to do in order to survive, Skarsgard as the Northman in what is the best sequence of the film is seen (without background for conveying actual motivation) attacking a village/outpost and proceeding to slaughter everyone in sight along with his rampaging companions who then set up to carry off all the women, children, and surviving men into slavery themselves. It is only when he hears the name of his uncle uttered in mention of now being outcast to Iceland is there a spark of something beyond unadulterated anger and brutality and accompanies the cutting of his hair to a more “civilized” and less threatening length. Without context or meaning, observing the protagonist laying waste to a village does not endear him to the viewer.
This isn’t my biggest quibble however…That comes in the form of feeling like we’ve seen this all before. The killing of the Northman’s father including his beheading in a forest while he watches from the side is pulled from the aforementioned Conan, the use of nom-de-guerre “The Northman” elicits Gladiator, the “big reveal” in the film is cribbed directly from Hamlet, and even the final battle (of course, we can’t have a film without a culminating battle between “good” and “evil”!!) at the base of a fiery volcano is a marginally better version of the lightsaber duel present in Revenge of the Sith complete with lava that isn’t actually hot.
The Northman was a film I hoped so much more for…it isn’t often that I will go out and see a film in a theater but this one seemed like it might be worth it. Maybe the social media algorithms are too good and convinced me it would warrant my attention. Its not that its bad…it isn’t…it looks good and has sequences that are downright excellent—the panning shot that follows the Northman through the village he so efficiently dispatches is downright brilliant—its just that the film does not add up to more than the sum of its parts…and so many of its parts, while nice to look at, have been done before.