This film comes with a lot of baggage a fact reflected from the critical reception it got on its release . Some people thought it was a masterpiece whilst others thought it was pretentious self indulgent torture porn . Likewise the comments here that seems to split people right down the middle . Somewhat typically I could only award it 5 out of 10 because seeing it my rating for this film wavered between 1 and 10 . It wavers from dreadful pretentious rubbish and masterpiece from scene to scene
To be honest I almost switched off after the first ten minutes as a one eyed man stands leashed to a pole and indulges in mortal combat in 11th Century Europe . Nothing is held back in this scene of violence or indeed in the suceeding scenes that sees heads bashed in and disembowelment . One can quite understand watching this in the cinema and seeing half the audience walk out in disgust . The film doesn't help its cause much by having little dialogue and the need to insert bizarre surreal sequences in to the narrative
The film does pick up when One Eye and his child companion come across Christian converts who wish to travel to Jerusalem to fight in the Crusades and board a boat a boat to the Holyland only to come across a strange place that geographically is not in the Middle East . Here the film works at its best as the characters try and work out the mystery of where they are and what fate has in store for them . At this point it's almost like APOCALYPSE NOW meets Tarkovsky
Impressive as this is director Nicholas Winding Refn feels the need to go overboard on the directing front and he's neither Tarkovsky or Francis Ford Coppola . Certainly the film has a sense of intelligible portent dread throughout but like his previous film BRONSON Refn shows off a little too much which becomes painfully irritating . Less would have certainly been more This interferes with whatever the subtext the narrative might been making . There's an ecclestastical meaning there somewhere . One character refers to One Eye " He has many Gods while we only have one ( Christopher Hitchen's would reply to this by saying " Good because we're getting closer to the true figure " ) and of course the characters are trying to sail to the Holy Land but this is undone by the pretentious imagery . Strangely the film features a twist ending that possibly isn't entirely leftfield since the characters drink a psychotropic brew that has a mystical maninkari effect , but this leads the audience to ask how anyone can sail to the Middle East only to end up in North America ?
I tried to like VALHALLA RISING and from a technical viewpoint it is very impressive . Unfortunately the director sabotages his own film by including too much gore and too much " Oh look at me aren't I being so clever ? " to the detriment of storytelling and subtext. It's difficult to see what market the film is trying to buy in to . Is it the historical epic crowd , the horror crowd or the art-house crowd ? This makes for a very unsatisfying film
To be honest I almost switched off after the first ten minutes as a one eyed man stands leashed to a pole and indulges in mortal combat in 11th Century Europe . Nothing is held back in this scene of violence or indeed in the suceeding scenes that sees heads bashed in and disembowelment . One can quite understand watching this in the cinema and seeing half the audience walk out in disgust . The film doesn't help its cause much by having little dialogue and the need to insert bizarre surreal sequences in to the narrative
The film does pick up when One Eye and his child companion come across Christian converts who wish to travel to Jerusalem to fight in the Crusades and board a boat a boat to the Holyland only to come across a strange place that geographically is not in the Middle East . Here the film works at its best as the characters try and work out the mystery of where they are and what fate has in store for them . At this point it's almost like APOCALYPSE NOW meets Tarkovsky
Impressive as this is director Nicholas Winding Refn feels the need to go overboard on the directing front and he's neither Tarkovsky or Francis Ford Coppola . Certainly the film has a sense of intelligible portent dread throughout but like his previous film BRONSON Refn shows off a little too much which becomes painfully irritating . Less would have certainly been more This interferes with whatever the subtext the narrative might been making . There's an ecclestastical meaning there somewhere . One character refers to One Eye " He has many Gods while we only have one ( Christopher Hitchen's would reply to this by saying " Good because we're getting closer to the true figure " ) and of course the characters are trying to sail to the Holy Land but this is undone by the pretentious imagery . Strangely the film features a twist ending that possibly isn't entirely leftfield since the characters drink a psychotropic brew that has a mystical maninkari effect , but this leads the audience to ask how anyone can sail to the Middle East only to end up in North America ?
I tried to like VALHALLA RISING and from a technical viewpoint it is very impressive . Unfortunately the director sabotages his own film by including too much gore and too much " Oh look at me aren't I being so clever ? " to the detriment of storytelling and subtext. It's difficult to see what market the film is trying to buy in to . Is it the historical epic crowd , the horror crowd or the art-house crowd ? This makes for a very unsatisfying film