Indeed the movie promises at the beginning and the way of filming the whole thing was okay, very unordinary, and it really captured the scenery which, in contrast with the story, is quite impressive. I also really liked the brutalilty with which the few fight scenes are depicted. However, the movie has such a slow tempo and barely any dialogue or action; it's 2 hours of silent scenery & face shots, and it was too much for me. At least some story would be good...

incredibly dull and dark + exteremely violent (spilling guts, cut heads, etc) couldt watch more than 40 minutes...

The first couple minutes are pretty cool.

Bizarre and compelling. Beautifully shot story that felt like a parable ... even if I couldn't figure out what the point was. Gorgeous soundtrack.

Hampered in places by some of the supporting acting, but on the whole, staggering. It's terrifyingly immersive, in large part due to digital photography that rivals Antichrist's. The characters may not seem to "do" enough to warrant such heady attention, but that's half the point. A human being in 1000AD is nothing more than an isolated speck in Refn's divine landscape, but as a result every action, every thought, every life is a monument in a sea of mystery, blind to the world it anticipates.

as yet another person versed in herzog's works i immediately related this to aguirre, yet somehow i feel the the actual intent of this movie, hate me if you will, is more intellectual. the setting is more ambiguous, and the real point of it, the only thing we have to go after is the flora. how many movies give you only that?

A dull pseudo-artsy mess.

"The Bruckheimer-style storyline is merely an excuse to film a Joseph Conrad-worthy existential journey to hell." - Lauren Wissot

Disappointing after having enjoyed Refn's two more famous films. Where some people seem to see an exploration of violence and nature I just experienced tedium and pretension. Room for interpretation is all well and good, but this felt like a projection of a basic moral message through the ultimate bad-ass (TM) protagonist who never utters a word. Essentially this is a primal, much less entertaining precursor to Drive.

Nothing more than an appropriation of cinematic styles. Violent mysticism in great scenery. The Dark Ages made digital.

A beautifully shot film with artful ambitions (or should that be pretentions?) I didn't mind the slow pacing, it suited the mood of the film. But lovely cinematography alone does not a good film make and in the end it is badly let down by the lack of character development and a narrative arc.

Like in Aguirre, the Wrath of God (its most obvious influence), nature dominates the characters, reducing them to an infinitesimal presence against a harsh and unforgiving backdrop. But this isn't just a retread, and Refn's ambiguous and allegorical treatment of religious themes - along with his stunning digital cinematography - make this a haunting film in its own right.

Valhalla Rising does a few things right; there's some beautiful, arresting imagery on display here, and while the characters, setting and story are all certainly intriguing, they are presented in a particularly opaque manner. There's next to no dialogue, long periods of brooding silence accompanied by a droning, martial-industrial soundtrack, but it's the pace, or sheer lack of it, that really lets Valhalla Rising down, and while I enjoyed the experience, it's not a film I could easily reccomend

Refn makes his art out of testosterone. If he made sculptures instead of films they would be made from blood, cum, metal and mud. Some people would like that, but majority would go like 'Oh, I see what you did there, you pretentious SOB lol'. Same with his movies; they have something that attracts attention, but not enough of substance to maintain it. At least this one is better than Bronson.

Like a feature length version of the killing of Col. Kurtz. Interesting idea which unfortunately doesn't work. There's simply too little narrativity to justify it's running time.

It reminds me of Herzog's Aguirre, but that's all. Fell asleep halfway, managed to see the other half with my eyes taped open. There was something there, but Nicolas lost it halfway.

Good Cinematography

Refn continues his attitude of, "I'll do whatever the fuck I want." I applaud his bravado and his vision. Valhalla Rising is a masterpiece in atmosphere, but it falls short in its minimalist narrative. Really, it feels like one long monologue in its discussion of... I dunno.

The directing and the style was something odd and beautiful same time. The story was told as you were there; it was nicely cryptic. But the latter half did not give what the beginning promised and evidently it thumbled it's own feet.

Yes, yes, it's very artful and gritty, I get it. The scenery is beautiful and the overall emotion of the movie is that of forlorn darkness, but to hell with all of that when I was so bored, I was ready to claw my own eyes out. I don't require endless action from a movie to like it, but at least some kind of a plot to keep me awake is usually preferred.

Making an arthouse film about vikings has got to be one of the most ridiculous things anyone has ever came up with. Perhaps 20 lines are spoken in this entire film and all of them are said in an apathetic droning monotone. Add a plot that doesn't make any goddamn sense and you have this little head-scratcher of a Conan the Barbarian goes to film school.

Valhalla Rising seamlessly floats in a stasis of silence and the incorporeal; it extrapolates an indissoluble tryst between man and civilization, Pagan polytheism and sycophantic Christian Crusaders collide in a thematic primeval allegory. The misty eldritch imagery conjures aberrant visions of an ascension into the vaporous Macabre underworld of OneEye's clairvoyant prophecies. It's a numbingly experimental trip into an altogether verdant hallucinatory universe.

Wow. Visually striking, almost without dialogue, and I found it quite hard to know what to mean about this. I was a bit bored, but the movie has qualitities. Quite a lot of blood-splatter and fighting scenes filled with gore.

SLOW BURN: The movie.

The main flaw is the director who's too in love with his camera. Everything about it is beautiful to look at with a brooding atmosphere interspersed with scenes of brutality but there is a complete absence of material. Thematically it's another existential voyage into the abyss which has been done better. The chapter titles are also terribly amateurish. The costumes, acting, and production values are well done though which indicates great potential that never manifested itself.

A mute Viking warrior and a young boy go on an existential journey to hell in this dark and mesmerizing flick by Nicolas Winding Refn. Brutally violent and achingly beautiful in equal doses, drenched in ominous music and intense bursts of color. It reminded me a lot of Aguirre the Wrath of God, but instead of Klaus Kinski lurching around like a goon, you get Mads Mikkelsen brandishing an axe and staring a hole through one motherfucker after another. Epic.

paced like a coma, with a mist of hallucinatory imagery slowly soaking through to the bone, this allegorical quest into the heart of darkness meditates not just on faith and spirituality but on masculine cinema as myth, trying to externalise the states of being that characterise the films refn grew up with. unfortunately, if there's mischevous glee in the mismarketing toward the 300 contingent, the film itself remains as stubbornly po-faced, dour and inscrutable as its one-eyed protagonist.

Mood, pace, colour, post production, tension, minimalism, mountain porn.

I liked the atmosphere created, and most of the cinematography, but this had next to no substance to it. Minus ten points for the tacky red font dividing the five parts.

All Refn does is putting on lots of air and mimicking the effect of infinitely better films (namely Aguirre and Stalker).

Extremely atmospheric. Hypnotic to watch. Cinematography is mostly fantastic, although the digital photography look feels a bit overdone at times. The plot, and its subtext, is a bit too opaque, but the more I think about it the better it gets.

Essentially Aguirre: The Wrath of God minus the substance of its predecessor. While I'm not impartial to films with slow pacing, Valhalla Rising's drags out way too much for way too little in its 90-minute duration. That being said, the remarkable digital cinematography along with the ambient soundtrack establish an undeniably haunting atmosphere. I just wish there was more depth to this than "Vikings wander into uncharted territory, go crazy, and brood pensively about it for a while."

A constantly evocative take on the inextricable link between violence and civilization. Even the lingering moments, and oh there are many, consist of an infinity of contingent possibilities of bloodshed. In so finely explicating its theme, the film is mesmerizing.

2 interesting movies in one. The action parts are violent and brutal. The dreamy travel sequences are slow and visually impressive. But when they are combined in this film, the pacing is uneven as the plot grinds to a crawl in the middle.

Boring!

Absolutely stunning. A masterpiece of cinematography and tone. Pretentious, sure, but it works.

Hauntingly beautiful and extremely brutal, but riddled with uneven pacing and a screenplay too cryptic for it's own good.

'Conan the Destroyer' as co-directed by Béla Tarr and Terrence Malick. I sort of liked the minimalistic approach, but Refn can't hold his nerve and stylizes his brutal violence to the point that you're expecting old Arnold will show up and smash poor Mikkelsen's brain in.

*yawn*

23/07/2012 visuals ok, story lacks

An amazing space journey in Viking times (!) by Danish cult-director Nicolas Winding Refn (Pusher 1-3, Bronson, Drive). I'm very biased here. Firstly I'm a fellow-Dane. Secondly I'm a huge fan of Refn's work regardless of nationality. I literally like all his movies, although Bleeder might be the weakest of the bunch. Valhalla draws on inspiration from classic, in lack of a better word, ambient-exploration-films like Solaris, Aguirre, Apocalypse Now, 2001: A Space Odyssey and more. Be open!!!

What a treat for eyes and mind! One of the few pieces of art that leaves you with way more open questions than answers it provide if you can see not just watch that is. Yet this is not your usual action movie, or better way to say it not your usual movie for it is slow paced and symbolic to the bone. One eyed man who sees more than the others, young boy who knows better than old men, a travel to somebody's hell and somebody's holy land. Worth seeing but not recommendable to everyone.

It's a departure for NWR. It's very audio-visual, concerned with mood and constructed like a dark fairytale. There is little dialogue. But it's also a typical macho fantasy film. A stoic, mute superman, One-Eye is the teenage or henpecked male's self-ideal: Everyone in his bullshit world respects him out of fear and he needn't bother making a single verbal or facial expression. Besides being a vicious killer, he is unhampered by trifles like a personality or a biography.

What promises to be an epic tale of a Norse tribe unknowingly being dragged to hell by their captive One Eye becomes an exercise in dragging the audience through hell. 'Valhalla Rising' is the finest example of what can happen when a film-maker doesn't have a vision for a complete story in mind. Much of the film, you sit in silence, watching the men sit in their boat, surrounded by fog. Eventually they die, but you don't care. All that time spent doing nothing creates nothing but resentment.

Reminds me a lot of 'Black Death', which I prefer over this film. Still worth a watch especially if you enjoyed 'Drive' as much as I did.

The main character doesn't say a single word the entire film. Take that as you will.

The themes are certainly something I can appreciate, but I have to scoff at how Refn chose to handle the story. It may have been wise to make the mute Norse warrior as mysterious as possible, but that doesn't mean that he should sacrifice the context of the story itself. We know nothing about the boy or even the pagans that he was with. And the ending was just ridiculously weak. It's the most beautifully shot of all Refn's films though, so aside from all the narrative flaws it is a lovely film.