The Northman

Year 15, Day 91 - 4/1/23 - Movie #4,392

BEFORE: Willem Dafoe carries over again from "The Card Counter", and April is here, so here's the format breakdown for March: 

12 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Juliet Naked, The Pallbearer, Monster-in-Law, Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!, Your Sister's Sister, Endings Beginnings, The Bling Ring, Blithe Spirit, Things We Lost in the Fire, Fearless, Old Henry, The Card Counter

7 Movies watched on cable (not saved): Dinner With Friends, Something Borrowed, The Fault in Our Stars, Belfast, Mr. Nobody, Space Jam: A New Legacy, Nightmare Alley

2 watched on Netflix: The Wonder, Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio

2 watched on iTunes: When in Rome, Villains
2 watched on Amazon Prime: The 355, Without Remorse

2 watched on YouTube: Love After Love, Green Card
1 watched on Disney+: Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
1 watched on Tubi: Nobody Walks

1 watched on HBO MAX: No Sudden Move
1 watched on a random site: The Weight of Water

31 TOTAL

I'll get back to Oscar Isaac in a bit, and it's too bad I couldn't follow the Tye Sheridan link to "The Tender Bar" or the Tiffany Haddish link to "The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent", but those are the breaks.  One link at a time - and I've got my sights set on Easter Sunday.  Just ordered a bunch of Easter candy via Instacart, because I checked several drug stores this week, and none of them have the selection of candy I want.  Sure, they all sell Peeps and those Cadbury Creme eggs, but I prefer the Russell Stover chocolate eggs, they come in flavors like maple and coconut and raspberry whip - that's my jam. 

THE PLOT: A young Viking prince is on a quest to avenge his father's murder. 

AFTER: I don't watch that "Vikings" show on cable, so really, my knowledge of Scandinavia only comes from a junior high-school report on Norway and reading "Thor" comics. Isn't that enough?  My lack of knowledge about Iceland is even worse - I know it's cold, but there are also hot volcanic springs there, it's a land of both ice and fire. 

And back in 915 A.D., this was a very wild, dangerous part of the world, that much is clear. Lots of violence, warring factions of men in those funny horned helmets, but also a nautical people who sailed a lot, and maybe even reached America.  One has to wonder, though, if the modern Scandinavians and Icelanders have reconciled with the violent pasts of their ancestors, maybe that's what this film is really about.

I could be off-base here, but if "Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio" was referencing the "Frankenstein" story, I got a big "Hamlet" vibe from "The Northman" - a lot of story elements are similar.  The lead character is named "Amleth", which is an anagram of Hamlet's name, and he's a prince whose father was killed by his uncle, and that uncle is now married to his mother.  That's a pretty big coincidence, right?  It feels like maybe this wanted to be the real story of the characters that Shakespeare based "Hamlet" on, only Billy Shakes toned it down a bit and wanted fewer beheadings in the story - swordfights are probably a bit classier on the British stage than they were in a muddy Icelandic field. 

But of course, there are differences - the Ophelia analog is Olga of the Birch Forest, who doesn't live in a castle, she's another tribesperson captured by Vikings and sold into slavery, though she may have some kind of nature-based spiritual powers, it's a bit unclear.  Also the uncle, Fjölnir the Brotherless, has an older son and a younger one with Queen Gudrun - so Amleth's got a half-brother and a step-brother, where Shakespeare's Hamlet was an only child.  And Amleth doesn't get visited by his father's ghost (I guess his father's already in Valhalla, and couldn't get free?) but instead he gets a special sword and advice from a he-witch.  He also has visions of a seeress, played by Björk, and that's pretty cool. 

Also, this is the Hamlet story with a whole bunch of Norse mythology in it, and the last sword battle is apparently set on Mustafar, which is also pretty cool.  Oh, right, there are volcanoes in Iceland, almost forgot, and the Vikings call that "The Gates of Hel", and that's cool too. These Vikings are also always participating in weird rituals that give them revealing hallucinations, so this is also a bit of a stoner movie. I myself chose to drink a large beer during the film, and also eat the last few squares of my pot-infused "Herb-shey's" chocolate bar.  This may have been a mistake, because I fell asleep about an hour into the movie, and I had to finish it Saturday morning. (I'm calling my recent experiment with pot a failure, because all it did was make me sleepy - and I had to combine it with beer to get that.  I may have been ripped off by paying $40 for a regular chocolate bar.)

So here's the plan, years after his father's murder, adult Amleth is a Viking berserker, working his way up by ransacking villages, but an encounter with a seeress puts him back on the path he fashioned as a child - avenge his father, rescue his mother, and kill his uncle (Well, as they say, two out of three ain't bad.).  To do all this, once he finds out that his uncle was overthrown in Norway and is living in exile, he brands himself and pretends to be a slave, sneaking on to a ship bound for Fjölnir's compound in Iceland.  

In addition to the hard labor around the camp, the slaves are expected to play in a violent game that's a bit like lacrosse, except in addition to moving the ball down the field the players are encouraged to beat each other to death with their sticks, which are also clubs.  (I'm not sure who the other team was, perhaps a bunch of Vikings visiting from Uppsala, or Minnesota.  Anyway, most of them won't be traveling home.). Amleth's young half-brother jumps into the game unexpectedly and almost gets killed, but Amleth protects him, so he gets to move up to middle-management slavery.  This gets him closer to his uncle, and also turns suspicion away from him when someone attacks the camp each night and kills a few warriors.  Amleth also gets to choose a mate from the other slaves, so naturally he chooses Olga, who he's been drawing closer to anyway. 

Amleth also gets a chance to be alone with his mother, and he reveals he is her long-lost son.  Her reaction is a bit unexpected, she claims to have never loved her first husband, having been raped by him, also she's the mastermind behind the plan to kill Aurvandill, by seducing his brother Fjölnir and begging him to kill the king.  Oh, and she promises her son that if he's successful in his quest to kill her current husband and her son, then she'll be HIS queen.  But wait, she's his mother, so that means...oh, so it's like THAT.  Ewww.  The Norse don't seem to have much of a problem with incest, if it means they get to save their own skin.  Amleth's answer to his mother's offer is to kill his step-brother Thorin - so that's a big "No thanks", I guess. 

Amleth decides to run off with Olga, they catch a ship for other lands, but then he learns that Olga is pregnant, and realizes his children will never be safe, as Fjölnir is sure to eventually track them down.  So it's back off the ship as there's more killing to be done, and there's still that battle at the Gates of Hel that the Seeress predicted.  Also, Amleth's never going to get to Valhalla if he doesn't die in battle, so there's that. It's funny how much more eager some characters are to put their life on the line when they believe in an afterlife. And just remember, if you think the Norse religion is death-centric, as they point out here, the Christians are the ones whose God is a corpse nailed to a tree.

Also starring Alexander Skarsgard (last seen in "The Hummingbird Project"), Nicole Kidman (last seen in "Wolfgang"), Claes Bang (last seen in "Locked Down"), Ethan Hawke (last seen in "Juliet, Naked"), Anya Taylor-Joy (last seen in "The Menu"), Gustav Lindh, Elliott Rose, Phill Martin (last seen in "Pan"), Eldar Skar, Olwen Fouéré (last seen in "This Must Be the Place"), Edgar Abram, Jack Gassmann, Ingvar Eggert Sigurdsson (last seen in "Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald"), Oscar Novak (last seen in "The Batman"), Jack Walsh, Björk (last seen in "The Sparks Brothers"), Ian Whyte (last seen in "Star Wars: The Force Awakens"), Andrea O'Neill, Rebecca Ineson, Kate Dickie (last seen in "The Witch"), Isadora Bjarkardottir Barney, Kevin Horsham, Seamus O'Hara, Scott Sinclair, Tadhg Murphy (last seen in "How to Build a Girl"), James Yates, Hafpor Julius Bjornsson, Ian Gerard Whyte, Ralph Ineson (last seen in "Gunpowder Milkshake"), Murray McArthur (last seen in "Made of Honor"), Nille Glaesel, Jonas Lorentzen, Ineta Sliuzaite, Helen Roche, Faioleann Cunningham, Gareth Parker, Eric Higgins, Matt Symonds, Adam Basil, Jack Jagodka, Mike Snow.

RATING: 6 out of 10 hallucinogenic mushrooms