Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Valhalla Rising

Valhalla risingThe Gist: A captive warrior attacks his captors and flees.  He then goes on a journey of discovery with the boy who helped him escape.  He’ll join up with a group of crusaders but what they will find won’t be exactly what they expected.

As anyone who follows my blog knows, I hate trailers because they are full of spoilers.  I usually just glance over critics’ reviews and check out ratings from aggregate sites like Rotten Tomatoes or IMDb.  The system works for me.  The movies I pick turn out to be what I expected the vast majority of the time.  This time, it didn’t work.

This movie was, at best, an incomprehensible amalgam of images with a haunting soundtrack and some good acting.  How was the script?  I can’t really speak to that because there are maybe 100 words uttered in the whole movie.  Does it make sense?  Hardly.

When the movie was over, as I often do, I checked out the trailer.  I was aghast to see that in those 3 minutes or so they had condensed every spoken scene and the most alluring images.  I can’t imagine the countless other viewers who were duped like me into viewing a movie that looks like it came out of the mind of a man who had evidently dropped acid.

The Bottom Line: I saw some impressive reviews of this film too and don’t understand where they’re coming from.  Did we see the same film?  I’m tempted to say I just didn’t get its message, but at some point I have to draw the line.  The movie is incredibly slow, it has almost no spoken dialogue to clear things up (and I loved The Artist, so it’s not like I need dialogue, I just need clarity!!), it’s built in sections that almost start over with each segment, and it just plainly doesn’t make sense.  Skip it!

Grade: 2

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