Valhalla Rising (2010) Action, Adventure, Drama movie story Hollywood movie Online movie trailer Valhalla Rising (2010) Action, Adventure, Drama Movie review English movie Online
CREW
Director:Nicolas Winding Refn
Writer:Roy Jacobsen, Nicolas Winding Refn
Release Date: 2010-07-16 - NY and/or LA
Distributor(s): IFC Films
Genre:Action, Adventure, Drama
Country: Denmark
CAST
Mads Mikkelsen, Gary Lewis, Jamie Sives, Ewan Stewart, Alexander Morton, Andrew Flanagan, Gary McCormack, Gordon Brown
PLOT
A man with a remarkable talent for violence must fight to survive when he sets out on an extraordinary journey in this fantasy from director Nicolas Winding Refn. One Eye (Mads Mikkelsen) is the nickname given to a nameless, mute warrior who has become a slave to Barde (Alexander Morton), a wealthy Scotsman who obtained One Eye for his remarkable fighting skills. One Eye is a fierce warrior but shows little loyalty to his master, and when the opportunity presents itself, One Eye murders Barde and his mercenaries and sets off on his own, with a young boy (Maarten Stevenson) tagging along to speak on his behalf. Eager to leave Denmark behind in favor of freedom and adventure, One Eye throws in his lot with a band of Christian Vikings, who've set out on an ambitious quest to travel to Jerusalem and claim the Holy Land as their own. But the voyage to the Holy City is a difficult one, and the Vikings are met with violent resistance, forcing One Eye to rely on his talents as a warrior to protect himself and his young apprentice. Valhalla Rising received its North American premiere at the 2009 Toronto Film Festival.
STORY
Director Nicolas Winding Refn (Bronson) delivers an action-packed epic about a savage one-eyed Viking warrior and a young runaway who embark on a dangerous odyssey. Starring Mads Mikkelson, the film -- an official selection at Venice and Toronto last year and a featured selection at the upcoming BAM Cinemafest -- will premiere in theaters and on VOD under the IFC Midnight label beginning in July.
1000 AD, for years, One Eye, a mute warrior of supernatural strength, has been held prisoner by the Norse chieftain Barde. Aided by Are, a boy slave, One Eye slays his captor and together he and Are escape, beginning a journey into the heart of darkness. On their flight, One Eye and Are board a Viking vessel, but the ship is soon engulfed by an endless fog that clears only as the crew sights an unknown land. As the new world reveals its secrets and the Vikings confront their terrible and bloody fate, One Eye discovers his true self.
Valhalla Rising" tells the story of One-Eye, a mute warrior of supernatural strength, who has been held prisoner by the chieftain Barde for many years. Aided by a boy, Are, he kills his captor and together they escape, beginning a journey into the heart of darkness. On their flight, One-Eye and Are board a Viking vessel but the ship is soon engulfed by an endless fog that first disintegrates as they sight an unknown land. As the new land reveals its secrets and the Vikings meet a ghastly fate, One-Eye discovers his true self. Referencing masters like Akira Kurosawa Sergio Leone, and Andrei Tarkovsky, "Valhalla Rising" shows how carnage, once invoked, has no fealty but to itself.
SYNOPSIS
Co-written by writer Roy Jacobsen and Nicolas Winding Refn, Mute slave HARALD escapes his Scottish masters with the help of 10 year old ARE, torturing and killing them before joining a band of dispossessed Vikings. They go to sea, determined to return to Scandinavia to fight the spread of Christianity, but for HARALD the journey is also a personal one to discover his own origins. Caught in a terrible storm, the group drift for 40 days until, on the verge of death, they find themselves in a freshwater river. The land seems at once strange yet familiar. When they come under attack by unseen assailants, the groups' quest for their homeland takes on a bitter urgency as one-by-one they succumb to the onslaught, dying at the hands of the invisibles. Worse, they are no clearer about where they are or if this place even exists outside their imagination. Have they finally reached the new world, or Valhalla? Meanwhile, HARALDS's search for identity is compromised when ARE is captured. As the enemy reveal themselves, HARALD realises he has finally found his identity but at too high a price. As ARE’s life is threatened, HARALD is faced with an impossible choice; save the boy or save his soul?Even though "Valhalla Rising," starring Mads Mikkelsen (Casino Royale), has already been released in several European countries, it has only now released a US trailer. Check it out below.
Nicolas Winding Refn seems to see Valhalla Rising as a tone poem of sorts, but the acclaimed Danish director's seventh feature film is more one long atonal scribble. A grim, brutally violent action drama about a Viking war party who accidentally stumble upon the New World a long time before Leif Ericsson carved himself a place in history, some impressive location shooting and a striking display of commitment to his role from star Mads Mikkelsen can't make up for a general lack of substance and a pervading air of seriousness so unrelenting it borders on farce.
Mikkelsen plays One-Eye, a fearsome warrior, mute and scarred, held captive by a mountain clan who employ his capacity for emotionless savagery in gladiatorial contests where One-Eye's jailers earn a steady stream of money off his ability to make sure his opponents leave the ring feet-first. When a chance opportunity leads to One-Eye escaping slavery, he joins up with a Christian warband looking to make a name for themselves in the Crusades, but a seemingly supernatural fog drives them a long, long way off course.
Refn is obviously out to imbue Valhalla Rising with elemental significance, from the stoic opening title cards to the immensity of the Scottish mountains that serve as a stand-in for some unnamed tract of Scandinavia. The thundering score makes it very clear there will be few, if any laughs coming. One-Eye is a force of nature in every sense, violent and implacable, his fighting to the death taking place in a sea of mud.
The problems start when it becomes apparent there's little or nothing to the film beyond this constant, oppressive struggle for survival. Nothing as in not simply a lack of complex plot development or convoluted back story and so forth, but the absence of any depth at all, whether conveyed by the characters or (despite what Refn seems to have intended) the landscape itself.
One-Eye is angry; he slaughters people; he says nothing. For all but maybe ten minutes of Mikkelsen's screen time this is all the viewer gets. The Danish star tries valiantly, and sells the physicality of the role seemingly without effort but other than that there's virtually nothing for him to communicate.
The other members of the cast fare no better - lacking in any real screen presence to a man, they haven't a prayer of doing anything convincing with the tissue-thin material they've been handed. Restricted to speaking English, they could be from anywhere across half of Europe - nothing here makes this specifically Norse beyond some offhand references to the spread of Christianity.
The absence of substance lends the whole production a stiff, forced theatricality, never more obvious than in the extended sequence confined to the longboat in the fog. What should be a tense, nail-biting stand-off along the lines of a bloodsoaked medieval take on Hitchcock's Lifeboat descends into nervous comedy. Flat, portentous line readings, a monotone colour palette and overbearing attempts to scare the audience silly prove equal parts tedious and farcical.
Next to a film like Tian Zhuangzhuang's The Horse Thief or Lu Chuan's Kekexili, Valhalla Rising has neither a real sense of place nor of any deeper meaning. Tian and Lu steep their windblown landscapes in a detached, otherworldly mysticism which is clearly feeding into the characters' motivations and continuing development on multiple levels, something plainly obvious even with the bare minimum of dialogue. Refn gives us nothing beyond this is a violent landscape where violent men kill each other violently, like some tourist guidebook to the inner circles of hell.
And in similar vein Terence Malick's The New World also contained its fair share of artistic indulgences, the director waiting hours for just the right balance of natural light, the tides, birds moving across a shot and all the rest of the rumours. But part of Malick's genius stemmed from his rock-steady understanding of pacing, the need to balance staring at the view with an explanation of context, the better to elicit an emotional response. The New World's expository monologues actually made Colin Farrell of all people a creditable philosopher-poet. Valhalla Rising barely has a shred of poetry in it, visual or lyrical, from start to finish. Refn presents us with hardly any reason to care about what's happening, let alone to be moved by it in any sense.
Valhalla Rising is hardly a bad film, clearly made by people with talent, and taken in isolation the different parts of it leave a lasting impression - hear the score separately, view individual stills or see the trailer and they seem to promise a great deal. But there's nothing here to meld those parts into any kind of convincing, compelling whole. The cast do nothing to push the audience to react one way or the other, the landscape just sits there, the violence provokes little more than nervous giggles, the whole enterprise doesn't seem to have much point. When other directors have gone over very similar ground and Refn does so little to set Valhalla Rising apart, much less do anything better, his film is very difficult to recommend.
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