The 13th Warrior - review

[wiseheart]

Had I not seen the DVD in the Auchan supermarket, I might never watched this particular movie, as I generally dislike Antonio Banderas. I just don't like his low-eyed "latin lover" image. But I wanted to know whether or not the DVD would be worth buying, so I sat down and watched the movie on German TV. As my PC was dead anyway, I had some time on my hands - and boy, was I glad that I did!

I loved the movie to pieces. Banderas was actually good - especially when he was wearing that black [I]kofiyah[/I] on his head. And he showed the Arabian poet's accommodation to a profoundly foreign society very convincingly.

But the really great thing was what they did with the Vikings. We got assorted glimpses of a culture that was rough and barbaric and utterly alien for the main character, including a language, which he had to figure out entirely on his own. Vladimir Kulich was extraordinary in the role of laconic Viking leader Buliwyf - I wish Peter Jackson had Rohirrim half as good and authentic in the LOTR movies. I think Kulich would have made a terrific Háma; for Éomer, he would have perhaps been a bit old, but for Théodred, maybe...

Anyway, the individual Viking Characters wre well drawn, too. Easily recognizable, save the names (grin). The women were strong personalities, despite the very little screen time they have been given (Miranda Otto's Éowyn couldn't reach them cold water, as we say over here), and I was very happy that they didn't make a sappy happy end out of Ahmad's one-night-stand with the Viking girl.

I was honestly shocked that they actually had the courage to kill off Buliwyf - I felt sorry for him, but killing him off was more realistic, I think. Althoug I would've loved to see the king's son, that arrogant prick, got eaten by the cannibals and Buliwyf become the new king.

As for visuals, I found King Hrothar's hall worth of a Beowulf movie, the ships neat, and the ship/pyre burials very impressive. The cave dwellings of the cannibals were properly creepy, and I loved the bridge leading to the cave entrance across the ravine. The Viking seer women were creepy, too, but in a good way. I loved them.

The enemy was rather interesting as well. I miseed a bit that we haven't larned anything about their motivations, more about their strange and frightening culture. But as the movie is based on Michael Crichton's Black Fog, perhaps I'll learn more when I've read the book. It seems, I'll have to renew my expired membership in the Foreign Languages' Library.

All in all, it was a good and interesting movie, one that I can recommend to everyone who's interested in the Middle Ages and a little bit of horror. And German TV was generous enough to rerun it on the next day, so that I won't have to buy it, after all. Hail to VCRs!

P.S: Vladimir Kulich - note your that name, folks!

Cross-posted to the Otherworlds board

Comments

[lhun-dweller.livejournal.com]

I didn't realize you hadn't seen it, else I'd have pointed you to it long ago. Like you, I rolled my eyes when I saw the guy we've dubbed "Antonio Badactor," but he really did well here as the exile in a strange land, or as best he could with what they gave him.

The film has a lot to recommend it. Still, it clearly took some serious damage in the directing or editing: there was stronger story there than the film told. It got too wrapped up in the horror/slaughter part and lost some of the mythical journey/Beowulf feeling it should have retained. And I suspect it was cut for length. (Say what you will about Jackson and LOTR: he has shown the movie financiers that people will sit through a 3-hour film if it's worth watching.) The original director quit after conflict with Crichton and the latter took over - seems not to have been a good thing, IMHO. (I read on a website someplace that there had been efforts to create another version that would restore a lot of footage and thus story development. I'd love to see that happen!)

I, too, enjoyed the language element of the film, even if it was modern Norwegian they spoke instead of whichever northern language would have been spoken by Vikings in that time and region. The sequence of nights-by-the-fire scenes in which he gradually begins to understand a word here and there is one of my favorite scenes of any movie I've seen, as it captures so well that bit-by-bit-becoming-clearer nature of learning language by immersion.

The cross-cultural encounter aspects were also good. There was the mutual adjustment of the Vikings and the Arab (even his name gets mangled, poor guy: "Ibn" is "son of" - they want a short name, he gives them his formal name, which includes lineage), each foreign to the other. But we also got the enemy whose culture is so alien to the Vikings that their name cannot be spoken.

The Beloved had a serious, practical nitpick: how would the "eaters of the dead" develop and sustain a horse culture living in the caves of a craggy mountain range? I don't have to tell a Magyar that horses need a lot of grass or other fodder, and I saw nary a hay barn in those caves. And why would a cave-dwelling culture that worships bears take up horse-riding, anyway? IIRC, the people who became the Rohirrim developed a horse culture when they moved south onto the plains, not while they lived in the northern woods. (Of course, JRRT was a better researcher than Crichton could hope to be. He was a serious scholar - Crichton prefers to appear clever.)

I also had a practical nitpick. I'm willing to suspend disbelief and agree that a virtually prehistoric culture has somehow survived relatively unchanged - they live in caves in rugged, remote mountains, they don't hang out with other peoples except to kill them and gnaw their bodies a bit, so no real cultural exchange happens.

But where the heck did they get all those bear heads, bearskins and other bear bits? I could accept one or two bear outfits worn by the leader, a shaman or other Very Important Person. But bears do not gather like buffalo in large herds for convenient mass slaughter. And bears roam over large territories, so unless these prehistoric hunters had some very impressive preservation technology that had allowed them to preserve bear bits they'd been collecting since the end of the Ice Age, those people must have wiped out everything ursine for hundreds of miles around to outfit that many warriors.

Oh, BTW: the book you want is Michael Crichton's "Eaters of the Dead." I found it reasonably enjoyable and rather clever as a piece of fiction pretending to be true, although less engaging than the film as far as personalities go. The narrator ("Ibn") is a lot more formal and writes like a Victorian documenting his adventures among the savages, so it's more dry than the film. It apparently was written as a challenge, so be sure to read the long author's note at the end of the book before you start, as you'll get more out of the book that way. (Plus, you won't do what I did and think the info in the footnotes is real!) Doing so won't spoil anything for you, and as a writer yourself, I think you'll enjoy noticing the clever things he does along the way.

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

I read on a website someplace that there had been efforts to create another version that would restore a lot of footage and thus story development. I'd love to see that happen!

You are not the only one. That would be one movie I'd buy on DVD.

And I agree with the nitpicking. There are things that seriously haven't been researched properly. Overall, it gave a nice atmosphere anyway. EVen though there are misses where they shouldn't be.

"Eathers of the Dead", you say? Thanks for telling me that. I've simply translated the German title back - it seems the Germans chose a stupid way by titling their translation, once again.