The Northman: To Be or Not to Be.

The Northman is the kind of movie that signals itself to you over and over again, and not necessarily in a bad way. It's a boastful kind of movie, the kind of movie that if it were a person you'd like their confidence up until the point you discovered there's not much else there at least in first light, (subsequent viewing may reveal more to me) but in this initial viewing I found a movie that revels in its accuracy and “realness” and accepts the magic its subjects believe in on a “responsible” level that simultaneously loves on and passes no judgement on their beliefs while still serving its grounded feel, but also a film that never truly committs to its higher goals of social commentary on whiteness and masculinity. It's touts its realism everywhere as all director Robert Eggers movies do. In its use of language, in the costumes, the attitudes of its people, and their cruelty and even in the title cards. It boasts an noticeable but not yet gross admiration for hyper masculinity in ways that are more articulate careful and interrogating than movies it borrows from like Gladiator and most closely “Conan the Barbarian”. A Scene featuring a group of muscular alpha men murdering and pillaging carry on for what can seem awhile. A pre battle ritual where they act as close to exactly like the single minded animal like predators they will become in battle- hangs on for sometime bathing in its night air, allowing its actors to fully immerse themselves into the mentality and space these men gave themselves over to, but the scene does not give istelf over to it. It passes no judgement, engages in no emotion, and that could be said of the entire film. It's so engaged in the currency of the real it reduces the power it most needs to emphasize its goals..emotion and point of view.

I do not at all kid when I talk about how much this movie borrows from John Milius's hyper masculine operatic fairy tale “Conan the Barbarian”. The chords and notes all pretty much match. In tonality, in its brutality and wildness, and in certain cases scene for scene. The way Prince Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård ) finds and obtains his sword is almost frame for frame the same as in Conan, ( when he meets “Crum”) but the other scene that strongly resembles one from Conan also tells on the difference between these two and why The Northman just missed my heart.

There's a rich sense of emotion in the opening of Conan where the inciting incident for revenge occurs that is not present in The Northman. Milius's movie fully embraces the operatic elements. Every moment feels outsized, larger than life, drawn out, and overplayed just as it might be in the mind of a child who watched his father and mother be slaughtered right in front of him. Basil Poledouris's soaring melodrama by string is a large part of that particular magic, doing much of the emotional labor for the scene drawing attention to the trauma of this moment. The music in “The Northman” ( Robin Carolan and Sebastian Gainsborough) is in unison with Eggers approach dutifully true to the time, ( or at least what we envision it would sound like) but it too lacks the more sensitive emotions, or the confidence in its softness as a magnifier of where it and it’s characters are hard that Poledouris's score has. That aspect of the music; confidence in what it has chosen too is in unison with the movie which never truly feels settled in its times of sensitivity. It’s a bit off putting in a film that seeks to be a reclamation of the worser aspects of the singular infatuation of this culture in particular, and with toxic masculinity in general. Conan bathed in the glory of its Viking heritage and other such civilizations it borrowed from, almost to the point of drunkenness, but it found its purity in that openess to something so ridiculous. Giant Snakes, Snake arrows, and cult leaders who turn into snakes, and it’s all like “hey, that’s what happened man I swear!”. It didn’t just give credence to how real the mythology felt to its people, it played it as if its supposed to be real to us. The Northman let’s us know it’s engaging with mythology on the terms of the people but the use of drugs and near death experiences as the portal to these visions and places lets us know this is not a reality. That is an example of the constant need for this movie to be “realistic” or true as possible to its historic background. Another is its centering of men, when in many ways from who comes out as the most fully realized character to who Amleth's journey is going to announce the coming of the movie signifies this should've been a film centering the women. That commitment would be the exact energy to invigorate The Northman with the radical but entertaining ferver it tries for.

As it stands “The Northman” ends up a an animated body with no spirit, an ancient epic with very little soul. Like all Eggers projects to date it keeps the audience at a distance with its stoic masculine filmmaking with no dressing to mask that distance, unlike The Witch and The Lighthouse that doesnt suit the films ambition, leaving these issues bare. Thematically the movie wants to have a conversation about a certain kind of masculinity and whiteness and the falsehoods of both, and in ways it does and does not commit enough. Nothing about the whiteness of our ideas around of Viking culture is said loudly enough or profoundly to notice, same with its dealings with. The lack of commitment is seen in its casting and choice of leads. If Eggers film truly wanted to be the tale of male excesses and debauchery it sought it wouldve been told from the pov of one of its main women in either Nicole Kidman's “Queen Gudrún” or Anya Taylor Joy's “Olga”. It wouldve gave Olga more fight, not just in physicality but in word and action, because in truth Olga is not all that impactful beyond having Amleths child in this movie. Queen Gudrún has a scene where she gets to really spill life into this theme of the outsized egos and narrative manipulations of men, but its undercut by the films need to disguise a plot development. This is a major theme of this film, this conflict of desires both in and out of context that show themselves in the form of ineffective and effective guises. Robert Eggers is very much a director in the same spectrum as Nolan, and Mann, their filmmaking is very straightforward and restrained, save for in these hot culminating moments of exstacy still dedicated to a grounded sense of cold realism, but Mann has raging currents of emotion under his characters and layers them brilliantly, and Nolan disguises the lacking of character and warmth to the best he can in his films with magnificent set pieces/sequences and puzzles. Eggers tries for the former but it fails in all but one character that is aided pretty magnificently by a fierce performance from Nicole Kidman, the rest of the characters lack the gravitas to match the movies ambitions. The latter, those inventive action sequences that have pushed Nolans blockbuster career to the forefront of the genre ( that also stylistically borrowed from Mann or at the very least 1995's “Heat” ) are not present in The Northman. That is not to say The Northman doesn't have some great sequences, but it is to say they aren’t wild enough, imaginative enough to distract one from the fact that these characters aren’t necessarily three dimensional, and this story, has been told before. So we are left with a film that doesn't have the spirited excess of its previous incarnations, fails to in any serious way challenge the excess of patriarchy and toxic masculinity and still wants to be pleasing to its core male audience, and since the former might require a more peaceful ending, or a more disappointing one it balks. No one can serve two masters is the saying..and it seems that Eggers struggled serving the audiences lust for blood and spectacle and the films desire to challenge and critique our collective ideas around the culture. The two ultimately stalemate in this movie, and then leave a movie that should’ve been a fizzy pop sensation with fresh indie flavor stale and somewhat flat. A movie that manages to be a swing for the fences that ends up a base hit, which is fine, but not fit for the outsized expectations the film might have brought with it…but who knows maybe those expectations too have something to do with biases and beliefs about that culture.