As a Swede I am mildly offended.

Rating: 4/10 (24 October 2010)

If you were a Native American, wouldn't you get annoyed by a movie, in which the supposed "Indians" looked like Maori and spoke with a German accent? The "vikings" in this film are a disaster. Vikings DID NOT have horned helmets. If they spoke with an accent, it was NOT Scottish. The vikings in the film wear clothes and armor that is completely unlike anything a real viking would wear. I know this is a child movie-- but why not put at least a fragment of effort into making the "vikings" appear at least a little viking-y? This all becomes extra irritating when the supposed vikings make references to actual Norse gods like Odin and use the ancient Norse alphabet. (Ancient rune-stones with such writing can be found not far from where I live.) As the "vikings" in the film look and act like... well, nothing at all (except they have Scot accents), to be frank, why put these references to actual Norse culture in at all? This just makes it even more irritating. The people who made this film could have checked out "Hrafninn flýgur" for instance to get a little bit into the viking feel... But apparently even checking vikings out on Wikipedia is too much of an effort... I wouldn't let my kids watch this movie, because I wouldn't want them to get the impression that our forebears looked and acted like dwarfs from World of Warcraft. Yeah, its a fantasy movie. But vikings actually existed... Another detail that annoyed me was the fact that the adults spoke with a Scot accent, and the kids spoke like Americans. The story is also stereotyped, a predictable "from zero to hero" story that even a young child could predict with unerring accuracy. The makers of this film have seriously underestimated children, I think. This movie is not a complete disaster-- it has its moments. But awesome animation and a charming character (yes, the black dragon) doesn't make for a movie anymore.