Lo, There Do I See All Sorts of Stuff....

Rating: 8/10 (18 January 2005)

I can see where some of y'all didn't get off on this...it's dark, it's confusing, etc....but I have to say I thought it was fascinating and really enjoyable.
There actually was an Arab who traveled up to the Viking lands and later wrote about it. But the thinking of many of those who think about this stuff is that he must have been irked at his hosts, because he's got the Vikes doing all sorts of unsanitary things, whereas in actuality they were among the cleanest people in the world. That spitting in the washbowl stuff? Nuh- uh. Behavior like that would have been grounds for combat and fines among Celts and Vikings alike. You could actually be fined if you didn't offer an arriving guest an immediate bath... So, lies. Or maybe the Vikings were putting the Arab on...
And the ship-burial with attendant sacrificial maiden...maybe, maybe not. I think that Ahmed's diary is the first place where that prayer was written down, though, since the Vikings, like the Celts, were a non-writing, purely oral culture. Also, the tradition with both cultures was that the battle ended when the leader was killed, so the fact that the Wendol were shown fleeing after Hornboy bit the dust is accurate as well.
As to the film itself, lovedlovedloved Dennis Storhoi and Vladimir Kulich. Banderas is wooden as ever, though it served him well here, and I was annoyed at the subplots (to do with the women, mostly) that didn't go anywhere. It didn't dawn on me for a while that Weilew was actually the queen, because women in Norse society had a lot of power and she looked pretty powerless. And the blonde who hooked up with Banderas's character kinda came and went out of nowhereland, too.
Plus Neanderthals (if that's what they were supposed to be) didn't coexist with modern man--they were gone thirty thousand or more years ago---so not so much there either, and I doubt they'd have had organized cavalry even if they did.
Still, as so many have pointed out, we don't see enough movies made from this mythology, so I'm grateful for even an imperfect one.