I genuinely don’t know if this is ignorant as hell or great satire. It’s a John Waters-esque vision of either the present or the very near future, Mad Max-lite crusted onto the underside of 80s yuppies and Reaganomics.
There’s something genuinely amusing about how silly this is, but at the same time its dialogue is openly full of racist and homophobic slurs and its characters don’t have much more depth than being obnoxious.
If you’re going into this expecting horror…
Hoooooooly shit. I knew this would be bad going into it but this is like offensively bad. Take everything you expect from a man writing a film with this title and make it 10 times worse and you have this absolute travesty.
I’ve never seen Jessie Buckley in anything else and after seeing this I still can’t tell you if she’s a good actor because she doesn’t fucking do anything. I can’t believe a screenplay this useless got produced. Nothing…
Imagine if the least weird thing that happened in Twin Peaks was when Josie went into the knob.
While it plays like an old-fashioned epic that’s reminiscent of Seven Samurai or maybe Andrei Rublev, The Northman seems aware of the cinematic paradigm it’s inhabiting.
I admire the way that this movie in an almost meta fashion reacts to the revenge story at its centre. Continuing to explore Eggers’ concerns of superstition, fate and guilt, the film never lets us see its protagonist as a real hero.
But taken at face value, it’s more spectacle than real, engaging storytelling. Too…
