Immediately from the opening shots, you can see why some have called this essentially Skyrim the movie. Unfortunately the plot and even its themes are far more straightforward and less sophisticated than the video game. This is a Viking revenge story pure and simple, deeply steeped in Norse mythology and played completely straight. Given that period film rarely go back so far, this has some exotic appeal. Yet it is so traditional, so old-fashioned in its sensibilities that it’s difficult to discern why someone would decide that making it in 2022 would be a good idea.

King Aurvandill returns to his domain on the island of Hrafnsey, victorious from raiding with spoils of treasure and slaves. His wife, Queen Gudrún and his son Prince Amleth welcomes him with great fanfare and he leads his son in a rite of passage to adulthood that invokes the Norse gods. The next day however, Aurvandill’s brother Fjölnir stages a coup. Amleth manages to escape and witnesses his mother being carried away as a prize. He swears to someday avenge his father and rescue his mother despite still being a child. Years pass and Amleth grows up to be a berserker warrior in a warband. After a successful raid, he encounters a seeress who reminds him of his oath. He also hears that shortly his coup, Fjölnir lost a fight with another king and is now a sheep farmer in Iceland. Learning that a batch of slaves is being sent there, he disguises himself as a slave and slips onto the ship. Onboard she meets an enslaved woman Orga who claims to be sorceress and wants him to help her escape. When they arrive, he finds that Gudrún is now Fjölnir’s wife and they have another son together.

Being a big budget Hollywood production, this film looks great and features plenty of named stars. I’m not confident that it’s historically authentic but visually and stylistically at least it makes for a compelling depiction of the Viking-era, at as conceived in the popular imagination. There are longboats, rage-fueled combat, warriors howling like wolves, the Norns, the gods and even Valkyries. It doesn’t shy away from blood and guts and the fighting is every bit as brutal as you would expect of the era. It is a little strange that while most films choose to escalate over time, by the time Amleth gets around to trying to get revenge, his uncle’s status has been downgraded to the mere lord of a farming community. This makes it feel at times more like a horror movie than action as Amleth terrorizes the farming community. But it also keeps the scale fairly modest which feels like a climbdown from the grand opening. The larger story proceeds pretty much as you’d expect with no real twists and no deeper themes other than the observation that the Norse gods were really bloodthirsty. It looks good enough to be decently entertaining but is so old-fashioned in how the story unfurls that it gets somewhat boring.

This is why it really is surprising to me how this ever got around to getting made. There’s no artistry in it and it feels disconnected from today’s today. Even as pure spectacle, it seems underwhelming compared to what else is out there. It’s just hard to imagine what kind of audience this was meant for. Anyone who actually is interested in the Viking-era would surely want a more serious film and everyone else would want more impressive battles. One good that comes out of it existing is that it makes for a strong counter-argument against the right who claim that woke Hollywood never makes anything with traditional values any longer. Well, this must be exactly the kind of film they’ve always asked for: masculine heroes, strong father figures, nuclear families and so on. It turns out that Hollywood directors and actors have no issues with making something like as long as someone is willing to pay them. Its existence proves that their claims of censorship in Hollywood is nonsense.

It looks to me from its paltry box office take, even taking into consideration the worldwide market, that audiences didn’t find this very appealing either. Maybe there’s a good reason why films in this style have gone out of favor.