Valhalla Rising

This entire review is a spoiler after this paragraph so if you want my feelings on Valhalla Rising, I will state it here and then you can stop reading and go rent it from Netflix or avoid it. Valhalla Rising has beautiful cinematography, absolutely beautiful in a dark, oily, yet lush type of way. Mads Mikkelsen as One-Eye is brilliant in his acting, but isn’t he always? And it is a movie that has no middle ground, you will either cherish it or hate the living hell out of it. For me it was awesome and I think, like many deeper movies of our time, it is underrated due to people’s misunderstanding of everything within it.

The Main Plot of Valhalla Rising

Valhalla Rising is one of those movies that need to be seen a couple times to grasp certain things, either that or you need to look beyond what you are seeing onscreen to understand the situation at hand. On the surface, the plot of this movie is that a kidnapped Viking warrior is made to fight other slaves for money by his owner Barde (Alexander Morton). The warrior is missing an eye and appears to be mute, though he fights like a demon unleashed. At different times the warrior has visions of the future and one such vision helps him escape his captors who he slaughters outside of the young boy Are (Maarten Stevenson) who had always fed and taken care of him.

One-Eye plants the chieftain’s head on a pike, disembowels his main lieutenant and the two escape to find some Christians en route to sailing away to the so-called “holy land” of Jerusalem. When the trip falters due to thick misty and no current, the men assume the boy is the cause (cursed) and One-Eye has to kill one to stop their assault. When the men finally find shore, it turns out that they have reached North America instead of the Middle East and they begin to lose people from native arrows, hunger, thirst and infighting. Inevitably the lot dies out leaving One-Eye and Are, who get a face-to-face with the natives and ultimately death.

The Way I Saw it… Your Questions Answered

Okay we have a one-eyed warrior who is all powerful, all wise and too good to talk to mortals… does that sound like anyone from Norse mythology to you? You also have an innocent boy alongside the warrior leading the Christian blowhards to their death. I’m going to go with Odin the Norse God and a mock Valkyrie of sorts as the boy (that is a stretch though). One-Eye can see events in the future which intensifies as the film goes on to the point where he builds a mysterious cairn in the Americas before surrendering his life to the Natives in order to ascend. The parallels of godliness for One-Eye are so blatant it can hardly be missed, unless you go with the raw assumption that he was just some mystical, badass warrior who was also a psychic.

The reason I make the boy as special as One-Eye Is because of the natives leaving him alone after the slaughtering as if they cannot even see him. The boy is also shot in a way as to accent his blonde features separately from the super-filthy adults and he becomes a bit of a religious icon when you take the full thing into thought. The rape on the sea shores was 100% rape (I rewound it enough to be assured) as the rapist pulled his knife and flipped the weakened man unto his stomach in order to cut the butt area out of his pants to allow him to do it – that entire sequence was a bit bizarre.

This movie will be loved by anti-Christian, history loving, warrior types that can cheer on the natives picking off invaders from Europe. Mads Mikkelsen is an awesome character actor and his portrayal of the mysterious One-Eye was damn near flawless for me. The lush green forestry, the dark contrasted players involved and the use of duotone colors on top of full color settings made the movie seem dream-like and surreal. As I have said, you will either love it or hate it and I am definitely in the loved it camp, actually I thought it was quite brilliant in it’s own right.