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dtaarin
Reviews
Valhalla Rising (2009)
A Masterpiece - the filmic poetics of Tarkovsky meets the mythic severity of the Norsemen
A journey through hell. Intense, gripping, raw warrior spirit. Not for the faint-hearted, this is a long way from AmazoNetflix.
After Ragnarok Gangleri tells us Líf and Lífthrasir will regenerate Life when the heat of battle cools. The Volva tells us that Baldr will return. Valhalla Rising takes us on a journey we know not why, nor where. The characters ask 'where are we?' and 'where are we going?' as many times as the viewer asks what is this all about?
'One-Eye' is a heiti for the god Odhinn here returning to Midgarth to ferry a ship of hapless Christian fools to Hell. Much of the way the viewer is confronted with brutal existential realities and the whole story is skewered with the implicit question what is one to make of life?
In the end, Odhinn sacrifices himself-to-himself to gain a prize, perhaps the rejuvenated Baldr returned from Helheim. I see this movie as a stirring rallying call to wake up, not to postpone the fight to some fantasy game state in an imagined future afterlife as Einherjar. The fierce demand is to value this life, here on this Earth, and to fight for this life now.
Vikings: Valhalla (2022)
Woke Netflixification a parody of Viking culture
1000 years ago Judeochristian invaders destroyed pagan culture not (only) by cutting throats but by over-coding, by synchretism, by over-writing pagan culture until it was dead in all but image. Netflix are doing the same again. This show projects a woke assault on a culture Netflixies probably despise.
This is not about Vikings, it's a woke subversion against those of us who are into Vikings.
This is not history it's a fabricated narrative of a future world Netflix-types want to create.
This does not honour Viking culture, it is a parody of it.
The writing is lame. In Ep1 Cnut's speech to his army could have been a great leader speech. I cannot believe the writers are so lame they made it so bad. I suspect it must be intentional to make Vikings (or men) look lame but it just makes the show dumb. The writing is awful.
Some of the actors make a good go of it though. Frejdis and Anna are better cut characters than most.
The story hangs together to be entertaining enough but the more Netflixification we are exposed to the more we see them achieve seductive production quality by reaching for the same rent-a-cliche tropes, narrative ploys, sets, generic-foreign-accent, generic period costume from one show to the next. Lame US factory TV.