Vikingdom – Review

16th February 2014

A horrible new trend in blockbuster film making is the mystical epic. After great films like The Lord of the Rings and OK ones like 300 proved that the technology could meet the style needed for these stories, audiences were hungry for more fantasy action. Unfortunately, this appetite has been met with too many rushed films with horrendous CGI or plot (see The Clash of the Titans remake or The Immortals). Vikingdom is among the films that tick all the wrong boxes.

When Thor, the God of thunder (Conan Stevens), puts into motion a plan to bridge the Heavens and Earth in hopes to rule both, Eirick (Dominic Purcell), a resurrected King, is tasked by the Gods to prevent him. Eirick must band together with friends, old and new, to battle the mighty God and hopefully put his plans to and end.

Firstly, the plot is incredibly half baked. The whole thing reeks of stock plot points and dialogue so poor that it’s, at times, almost unbearable. It’s so interchangeable with so many other kinds of films, the Nordic elements never pass influence. It takes so much from fantasy series like LOTR and Star Wars that it’s left with very little of it’s own identity, and what little identity it is left with is so under par that you’d rather it ripped off other series more.

A crutch of too many of these films is the SFX, and in Vikingdom they swing between not bad at all to completely ridiculous, sometimes dipping into eyesore territory. Something that really stood out was Thor’s hammer making lightsaber sounds. It was both comical and distracting, serving only as a reminder of all the better films I could have been watching. Vikingdom is a result of the post 300 cinematic landscape, where slow motion, colour filters and SFX are the drive of the new wave of mythical “epics”. Unfortunately for audiences, SFX do not a movie make. Instead, these films lose the balance of their SFX and plots, making them feel obnoxious, ridiculous and self-important.

My largest issue with this film is the length. It’s so bloated at its nearly 2 hour running time that what could have passed by as a slightly goofy, rainy day film that might have been good for a laugh at 90 minutes or under spills into tedious self importance well above its station. This delusion of grandeur is backed up by the unused and unadvertised subtitle, The Blood Eclipse, which tells you that they were aiming for a hopeful franchise (please, don’t!).

The performances all around are uninterested, wooden or just plain poor. There isn’t one that I can pick out and legitimately say I thought was decent. The stars either know what kind of film this is and care as little about it as I ended up doing, or are just not fantastic generally. When you put these two types of performance side by side on the same screen, it makes for no relationship dynamics and fake camaraderie, further pulling you out of the viewing. We’re given no reason to care about these characters, so when decent twists and plot points affecting them crop up, I was utterly uninterested.

As far as sets, they are so limited there never seems to be a definite sense of place. Instead, there are just generic settings with no real character. We’re either in a forest, or in a sea, or in a castle, never that forest or this castle. Instead of flowing between the scenes, it plods clunkily from place to place, which may have been less of an issue if not for the grand CGI establishing shots. So we swing from these grandiose shots setting up where we are and then these flaccid, generic sets.

Actually, limited is the key word for this film. What could have been a half decent film is limited by so much, the run time, the special effects, the stock plot, almost everything, that what I got from it was a serious limiting of my enjoyment and patience.

Its action sequences are Vikingdom‘s saving grace. I’ve seen films I’ve enjoyed more but with far sloppier shot fight scenes. Against my better judgement, I even found myself enjoying some of it. Being a gore hound, I gleefully grimaced at the brutality on display, but it was executed well so infrequently, plus the boring direction and general tedium you’re made to suffer the rest of the 2 hour runtime, meant it was hard to really appreciate when it did crop up.

We are spoiled for films who do this kind of thing so well, so that when a film like Vikingdom comes out and falls so far short of the mark, its fall is even more titanic. It is ambitious, and should be commended for it, but it doesn’t work on any level of what it’s attempting. If you’re into these kinds of films, I’d just wait for 300: Rise of an Empire.

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