It’s hard for me to write something coherent about ‘The Northman‘, Robert Eggers‘ recently movies released on screens. The only thing I can do is ask a few questions. Is Robert Eggers the same Robert Eggers, the director who made ‘The Lighthouse‘? How did actors like Nicole Kidman, Ethan Hawke say Alexander of the Skarsgård dynasty accepted roles and put their name on the credits of such a film? What category of viewers was this film made for?
It may seem a bit radical, but I’ll explain my questions briefly. You guessed it, I didn’t like this movie at all, and I gave it a rare (for me) 3 IMDB notes. ‘The Lighthouse‘ had psychological depth, had gradation in the building of tension, and when the shocking scenes appeared (towards the end) they were surprising but justified. In ‘The Northman‘ we are dealing with violence from the first to the last scene of the film, and the characters have the depth of their images from the comic books. I know that Eggers co-wrote the script with Sjon, a well-known Icelandic writer. I haven’t read any of his books, but to me this mix of Germanic mythology, Viking history and Shakespeare seemed like a salad in Marvel sauce, even though the film is made by Universal Studios. The changes in perspective of the characters were all predictable and melodramatic. From Eggers I recognized in this film only the passion with which he films nature and especially the sea. The actors failed to cover anything from the platitudes of the characters. Nicole Kidman, depending on how she is made up and the angle of filming, seems to be 20 or 50 years old, as if she were playing several characters unrelated to each other. Poor Skarsgård is forced to scream about half of the film while committing sometimes sublime and sometimes abominable deeds. The effort to create a language and an alphabet tries to give a historical touch to the movie, but the combination does not work well, and the effect is inauthentic, sometimes ridiculous, especially in the scenes with ‘pagan rituals’. There is so much free explicit violence in ‘The Northman‘ that Mel Gibson‘s ‘The Passion of the Christ‘ seems like a movie for the whole family. Who is the movie actually made for? On one hand, violence and nudity make it unrecommended for children. On the other hand, the flatness of the story makes it unrecommended for adults. I haven’t even reached the middle of the year, but I feel like I’ve already seen the worst movie of 2022 (from my perspective, of course). I hope that I’m not mistaken.