More than anything I’ve had a very had time working on religious systems when doing worldbuilding with people. Everyone wants to solve for the literal occurrences underneath it or the political role it holds without interrogating or understanding the beliefs of the people involved in it. Or, there’s an unwillingness to take belief seriously, to think that those involved actually care about their beliefs and will act on them, instead of just using them instrumentally.
Which is really funny when everyone is so versed in adopting fantasy worlds and learning the intricacies of their metaphysics. I think systems of magic and gods are looked at like technology – tools that can accomplish interesting things, without a value system alien to our own.
I’m a bit more cold on the movie, proportional to knowing a lot about the norse and about the kievan-rus
the movie gets away with a lot of complete fantasy because the historical record on many of the things in the movie is… completely non-existent. In truth, we have no idea what religious rituals the pre-christian norse performed, aside from a few scant and distorted descriptions in ibn fadlan’s memoirs.
The material culture is completely spot on and an obvious sign of thorough background research; slave economies, costumes, weapons, languages, etc are all exactly as right as we can tell but that only seems to disguise how much it is just a modern day story told in viking garb. Absent was the extreme legalism of the norse (especially the icelandic norse) as well as the complex webs of social relations that existed. In other words, there weren’t enough court cases and fart jokes for a movie about a blood feud.
Amleth himself had absolutely no reason to brand himself a slave, as it removed the legal recourse he had for dealing with a kinslayer. If the movie paid more attention to the actual culture of the icelandic norse, we could have had something really special. Still reaching the same climactic moments of mass poisonings, assassinations, and a duel, but with a simmering court drama instead of a dark souls boss fight to collect a magic sword.
Imagine if the movie featured at least one sequence where amleth brought his case before an icelandic thing, but because of fjolnir’s alliances and connections, could get no more recompense than a payment of wergild (lessened because he maimed the guy with no nose) and he takes this conclusion as such a grave insult that he then proceeds to do the whole murder and mayhem conclusion of the movie.
It was because of the material accuracy of the film that I felt more disappointed by its fabulations, as it misleads people into seeing the film as ‘authentic’ rather than the invention of 21st century artists. The inaccuracies are masked by the surface accuracy
Eggers was definitely extremely accurate on a lot of stuff in The Witch but he had the advantage there of only telling a story about a small group of people sitting in one space for the entire movie, which is also the direction he chose for The Lighthouse, which allowed him to limit the storytelling more believably to the inputs that would have affected those groups and places. Probably better for him to aim low for some of these stories.
We were also confused by the branding sequence because there was no effort made to explain why he could not simply leave his squad and become a guard on a merchant ship to head over to Iceland or whatever
I understand it from a narrative perspective, that eggers wanted to show us a slave’s perspective on the vikings, which I think is a good ethical point to make about a romanticized historical culture, but it doesn’t make sense from within the character’s perspective
Also, there wasn’t anywhere near enough poetry! I assume this is one of the major points of contention between eggers and the studio, as they had to ADR frankly ludicrous amounts of dialogue (its very distracting because I feel like I can hear the studio notes whenever there’s a blatantly ADRed line) but I wish that revenge uncle was allowed to compose at least one poem of grief a la Egil
Yeah in college I took one English class that involved a survey of a variety of old sagas and our final project allowed us to write either a regular paper (for cowards) our own poems or sagas in imitation of one of the ones we’d read (for the truly brave). I remember at the time being both darkly satisfied and somewhat frustrated at the form my story had to take in order to hit the huge list of requirements the professor had created (I believe there was a requirement that I include legalistic shit) and I remember the professor telling us that if it was starting to feel a little turgid and strange, we were probably doing it correctly, haha. I imagine that Eggers was not able to convince the studio that turgid and strange was good here
seriously, seriously did not like Everything Everywhere All At Once! reposting from twitter but I was shocked at how badly it misuses its premise:
that it would take this idea of experiencing alternate lives and make it all about minmaxing and cheap formalism… really kind of a piece of junk. I’m glad I waited rather than catching it in a theatre because I would’ve been incredibly bitchy about it otherwise. also I think these writers are like, more instinctively hostile to the concept of family than I am even
among other things I’m even kind of annoyed about the degree of stunt casting they got away with here. like, to be able to cast short round opposite actual archival footage of Michelle Yeoh from the 90s and turn it into this wet fart… not great
and ke huy quan being genuinely charismatic in such a failed sitcom pilot of a movie. It really feels like they squandered all the potential of these elements in isolation
remembering the movie’s in the mood for love “pastiche”, only the 2 lovers openly announce their feelings and longings for one another in endless dialogue
I don’t completely hate the movie but certain bad scenes stick in my head the most. Like when the two dudes put things in their butts to access the version of themselves that was really good at fighting. It really annoyed me. I can only imagine a writing process where someone basically says, “You know what would be even crazier than eating chapstick or stapling something to your head? Being a man who puts things in their butt!”
surprising myself a little at my choice of hill to die on but like the film is about a gay kid whose pain at not being understood by their mum tears reality asunder, and the mum has to destroy her own mind to understand her child; like i feel like the film gets it enough that a buttplug fight can just be funny. say what you want about the rest of it but leave my buttplugs be
This irks me. The duo who directed this film is comprised of an Chinese-American man and a white guy. My Pilipino friends who watched this were also quite moved and able to pick up on nuance despite not being Chinese-Americans. And the gay Black woman I went to see this at the movie theatre with could relate to Stephanie Hsu’s story enough to feel catharsis. If you can’t find nuance in this movie it’s not because you aren’t Chinese-American.