12/14/10 - Valhalla Rising

Valhalla Rising (2009, 93 min)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0862467/

This was another Netflix watch that was not 100% my choosing. My roommate thought it sounded good and it kind of did but it also looked a little cheesy. Though sometimes I really like cheesy action movies, I began the film with caution.

The movie follows One Eye (Mads Mikkelsen) who is an escaped slave from Scotland. He travels with his friend Are (The Boy) played by Maarten Stevenson. Eventually they meet up with some Crusaders and in an attempt to arrive at the Holy Land instead end up in what seems like North America.

Valhalla Rising has some awesome cinematography. But sadly, it's almost too awesome. Every single shot seems perfectly framed and too well thought out. Nothing comes off as casual in Valhalla Rising and this actually hurts it. The white sky is the brightest white sky imaginable, the green hillside is a perfect and lush green, and the blood is a bright and (CGI) infused red. It all looks really nice but it comes off as overbearing. By this I mean everything is just too perfect for its own good. There's hardly any dialogue in the movie to begin with so instead there's long scenes composed of cuts of people staring at each other. And these shots are usually done in the standard way that one would think when you think "frame this face and make it look awesome." I mean, this works every now and then but when every single shot is done in a way that screams "Hey! Look at how important this shot is! See how well thought out everything is to make it come off so well!" it ironically makes it all fail. There needs to be a release from these artistic shots and they just never come.

I'm actually fine with the limited dialogue in the movie. In the movie Le Samouraï the main character of Jef Costello hardly says anything. But that's cool because he has this sleek charisma about him that makes him one of my favorite characters in cinema. One Eye in Valhalla Rising also comes off as a pretty cool guy but he seriously doesn't say anything. There's talk from various characters that he communicates telepathically or something but more on this later. Really, I think you have to talk a bit to be likable. Take The Sphinx from Gone in Sixty Seconds. The guy doesn't say anything until the very end when he gives this highly intellectual quip. It's cheesy but the movie is bloated with goofiness so it all works out okay. Valhalla Rising takes itself too seriously and this is evident in creating a protagonist that doesn't say anything the entire movie. Honestly, limited dialogue could work for One Eye and he could still come off as cool as he does, but I think a complete lack of dialogue is a poor choice.

Finally, the plot of Valhalla Rising is abysmal. There's some plot somewhere but it's never really explained. Instead, I'm supposed to figure out why all these people are running around crazy, where the people ended up, and why everything is happening. Obviously the director wanted to make a point about something but when you have a protagonist that doesn't even speak, limited dialogue from everyone else, a boring plot, and every scene framed with a sense that it's the most important one yet shown in the film then everything falls apart and this vision just fails in my opinion. For a plot that really makes no sense, Valhalla Rising is strangely predictable at times. It's really only in a couple scenes but I found myself completing the limited dialogue (which is quite sad given that there's so few lines of dialogue, they should probably be better than anything I could come up with on the fly) or predicting how a scene would play out. Just another one of the many faults with this movie.

Overall, I gave this film a 2/10. Valhalla Rising is pretentious and I absolutely hate to use that word to describe a movie. Not every single shot in a movie is necessarily as important as I'm led to believe here. The only thing that saves the movie from a lower score is the fact that really there are some cool visuals and fight scenes. Sadly, this doesn't save this atrocity from the lowest score I've given since King Kung Fu.