So I finally saw this over the weekend. The visuals were amazing. Eggers is really, really good at that. The rest.....ehhhhh...I didn't really care for it. It felt like he was trying to live in several different worlds but never stayed in one long enough to settle in. It starts out as like this epic revenge movie, but has moments of oddity that I think are just there to set up the viking culture at the time, but still felt out of place and off-putting. Then it sprinkles in really bizarre supernatural elements that are quite jarring, and then morphs into almost a straight up horror movie (which was actually the part I enjoyed the most). In the end the revenge portion was really not satisfying and I left the theater feeling like I didn't really care about any of the characters that much. Kind of a misfire for Eggers, but I'll check out anything he does because even his misfires are pretty interesting and look amazing.
Felt the same way. If anything, I ended up with more empathy for Fjölnir than Amleth. I'd give it a slight thumbs down. Unfulfilling plot.
Saw this yesterday. Great ‘manly’ movie- if you liked 300, Conan the Barbarian and Braveheart, this is for you. Lots of badass fighting, grunting and swearing. There is an element of mysticism in it to a point that I would call it light dark fantasy. It doesn’t dominate the movie but be aware that this isn’t a ‘historical’ film. Theater was fairly full so hopefully this movie makes its money back and we some similar films in the future. I’d give it an A. Not an all-time classic but a fantastic movie.
I've read the budget is in the $70-90 million range. To date (2 weekends in) it has made $22M domestically and $18M in foreign box office. It doesn't seem likely to pull in enough money to equal its budget, and typically studios claim they need to see somewhere in the neighborhood of double the official budget before a film is truly profitable since they don't get all the box office money and budgets don't typically include marketing costs, etc. I wouldn't expect a sequel or anything, but Eggers is definitely a critic darling and it wasn't a financial disaster, so he'll continue making movies.
Yep, the original story is widely considered the inspirations for Shakespeare's Hamlet.... Amleth (Latinized Amlethus, Old Icelandic Amlóði) is a figure in a medieval Scandinavian legend, the direct inspiration of the character of Prince Hamlet, the hero of William Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. The chief authority for the legend of Amleth is Saxo Grammaticus, who devotes to it parts of the third and fourth books of his Gesta Danorum, completed at the beginning of the 13th century. Saxo's version is similar to the one in the 12th-century Chronicon Lethrense. In both versions, prince Amleth (Amblothæ) is the son of Horvendill (Orwendel), king of the Jutes. It has often been assumed that the story is ultimately derived from an Old Icelandic poem, but no such poem has been found; the extant Icelandic versions, known as the Ambales-saga, or Amloda-saga are considerably later than Saxo.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amleth
I finally got around to seeing this one last night. I have mixed feelings about it. They absolutely nail the aesthetic, but they maybe skimped a bit on some of the story and narrative elements. What you end up with is still very good, but I still end up a bit disappointed because I get the feeling that with a little bit more care to a few other areas we could have had an all time great film. Still worth watching IMO, but if falls short of being an instant classic.
The film cost like $95 mill. It originally was set for a budget of $45 million but the pandemic hit during the middle of production so it ballooned.
This movie made 68m globally. After streaming rights and DVD sales, and possibly some more special showings, it will get close to it's budget. It's already what I would consider a 'cult classic' and these things grow financial legs. I'd say they blew the budget on actors. They didn't need Kidman or probably Hawke, who probably made at least a couple mil each. They really only needed Skarsgård and Taylor-Joy, tbh.
I was really disappointed in The Witch it was amazing to look at but did not make much sense historically or logically. It also was not scary at all, from what you describe it seems like a lot of the same with at least more action.
