I think it was probably two years ago now – maybe more – that I first heard that director Nicolas Winding Refn intended to do an epic ”viking science fiction” movie called Valhalla. I was somewhat puzzled about this. People who are not particularly into sci-fi will often mistake the fantasy and sci-fi genres, so I thought he probably meant a fantasy movie. I imagined it was going to be big-budget, Hollywood-funded, cast of thousands, something only slightly smaller than Lord of the Rings. When I finally went to see the movie some months ago, I got something quite different. The cast is small, and the story is about an inexpressive and ineffable warrior who leads a small band of norsemen on a strange journey, in the process of which most of them die off in various ways.
Apart from some stylish and violent action scenes early on, the movie is full of very slow scenes, glacially paced panoramas of harsh and inhospitable scenery, amazing amounts of dirt, blood and palpably freezing temperatures, and people sitting and walking, waiting and wandering, lost and confused. There is certainly a sense of beauty and an accomplished rugged stylism to these scenes, but they also imbue one with impatience: where is this going? Is there a plot here? The journey continues, from Scotland to the new world, where the remaining characters go into spiritual dissolution. Slowly but surely.
The movie is divided into four chapters: Slave, Warrior, God, Man. Having seen and read some interviews with the director, I now know what it is supposed to mean. It’s about the evolution of humanity. In interviews Refn repeatedly refers to One-Eye (the warrior, played by Mads Mikkelsen) as “a [human] monolith”, and also mentions as inspiration the Tarkovsky classic Stalker. Upon realizing that Refn’s major idea of “science fiction” consists of 2001 – A Space Odyssey (1968) and Stalker (1979), Valhalla Rising (and Refn’s description of it as “science fiction”) suddenly does make a lot more sense. Refn’s movie is, to a great extent, a tribute to those two classics, having a similar construction of the narrative and the cinematography, symbolically showing mankind’s slow progress through history, accompanied by a mysterious force that helps us evolve. In Valhalla Rising, we go through the history of man as, first, a slave to cruel nature and circumstance, second, a race of war-mongers believing in war gods, third, as practicioners of organized religion, and fourth, having gotten beyond our troubles, emerging as simply human beings.
On the strength of this realization Valhalla Rising does become more interesting as an art movie and as a child of the directorial schools of Kubrick and Tarkovsky. I originally found the movie fairly beautiful, but also far too protracted to properly hold the attention, but I understood at the time that it was a movie of particular interest to film students, whom I know endless pore over Kubrick and Tarkovsky. My initial rating of the movie was 5 stars out of 10, but in hindsight I will concede that it does deserve more. I think it may be the kind of movie which will acquire substance and perhaps classic status as time goes by, like its illustrious predecessors, although I also think that it doesn’t rise above the level of what a Kubrick or a Tarkovsky might have done in their student years. The protracted style of storytelling, and the lengthy visual dwelling on certain situations, sometimes involving nothing else moving than the wind blowing through somebody’s hair, well, it seems to me that while such stylism is a valid form of artistic expression, it is also something that modern audiences find it rather torturous to sit through. Attention spans are not what they used to be, and I think that many audiences will feel that Refn might be overdoing the slow pace in this movie – just a bit.
Finally, being something of a sci-fi expert I cannot help interjecting that the theme of humanity’s evolution chronicled in allegorical terms is by no means limited to science fiction, as Refn seems to suggest. By the same token I don’t think it is reasonable to call Valhalla Rising a science fiction movie – as indeed nobody but Refn is doing – just because it mirrors some symbolism from two classics of that genre. In fact this sort of theme is one of the commonest in all sorts of art, in all sorts of genres. Similar symbols and allegories can be found everywhere; one very pertinent example being Takashi Miike’s 2004 movie Izo, also about a warrior who tears through the past, present and future to end up finally facing the serenity of a purifed humanity that has finally overcome all its obstacles. Thematically, similar ideas are also employed in movies ranging from Orlando to Highlander, where we have immortal people moving up through history and representing the crucial aspects of the human spirit that enable us to advance. Miniature histories are likewise employed in lots of movies, from Kristian Levring’s The King Is Alive (which, equally traumatically, has the characters struggling to survive in a desert instead of being on a journey) to Vincenzo Natali’s Cube (where all the archetypes of mankind are trapped in a cruel environment of unknown origin, which they must find their way out of). These sorts of meditations on the broad strokes of human history are, to my mind, great themes which very much deserve further exploration, and which are always interesting and thought-provoking to scrutinize.
director: nicolas winding refn
cast: mads mikkelsen, maarten stevenson, gary mccormack, and others
runtime: 93 min
country: denmark/uk
Film Rating: 
