You should watch this movie if you care more about swords and fighting men than you care about a good story.
Characters are extremely one-dimensional, you have your strong hero dude as a lead, whose motivation is just to kill his uncle, to the point where he throws away his entire future just for a chance to enact revenge. But even he forgot about revenge, so why couldn't he just have a normal life? You know, find a wife, make some little people, and live in the mountains eating mushrooms.
Nah, he has to find his uncle and kill him. An uncle who, by the way, is not a king or anything important anymore: after he killed Bjorn's father, he was ousted by another lord and now works taking care of sheep. I'm not kidding, that's your antagonist now: a very powerful shepherd. Seriously, that takes away so much from the interest I had on the story.
The girl, Olga? Well...she's pretty. That's all. She's a pretty girl that the lead character can have sex with. She has no purpose in the film, because even she can't convince him not to try to kill his uncle.
The queen mother is also a character to fill a requirement. The woman he's trying to save. But whereas other directors will make the character evolve, for instance having him reconsider his whole revenge plan once he learns of his mother's change of heart, Robert Eggers will force his character to fight to the death, no matter how useless that act of revenge becomes. He makes such a big deal of the words that Bjorn uttered a few times while he was sailing away: "I will avenge you father. I will save you mother. I will kill you Fjollnir". I get what you're trying to do, Eggers. Making this into an epic "slogan" for your story, so that we believe it's more grandiose than it really is. Problem is, nobody cares. I don't care about his mother, because I saw her for 60 seconds at the beginning of the film and all she did was yell at him to get out of her room because she was undressing. Most childhood scenes are about his father, so why the heck should I care about him rescuing this lady? I don't. I don't care, at all. Here's an idea: replace all scenes with his mother with flashbacks of his father, and you have a better emotional development.
Overall, this is a poorly written film, with a decent-enough director and a big budget. It could be better? Yes. It could also be worse. I was forced to watch it so I'm glad it wasn't worse. Bit on the long side though, last 30 minutes of the movie I just took out my earbuds and listened to music because I couldn't leave the theater.
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