Valhalla Rising

A pit-fighting slave wins his freedom by mangling his masters, falling in with a gang of optimistic Christian Vikings who, despite their lack of numbers, plan to sack the Holy Land. Director Nicholas Winding Refn's Valhalla Rising focuses on the totality of first-hand experience. Viewers are presented with a string of events that are only ever contextualised within the physical and intellectual limits of these would-be heroes. The meat of the film's second act revolves around an endless, drifting voyage to the New World in which these men have nothing to do but slowly starve and pick away at each other. Unable to rationalise their unending journey, the men fall prey to various forms of superstition. Initially they pray to their Christian God for more favourable weather. When that falls on deaf ears, their attention focuses on Mads Mikkelsen's One-Eye, the wretched gladiator they drafted for their crusade. One-Eye is a dour, supernaturally violent individual who seems to speak through a cherubic familiar. The men become convinced he is dragging them all down to hell, a thought not entirely discouraged by the vast green inferno they, eventually, wash up at. Overwhelmed by their new dominion, this Viking conquest flounders to indecision and in-fighting. Their faith proving small, even powerless, in the face of a vast, indifferent continent. The Americas are treated here as a revelation that demonstrates the insignificance of their ambitions. All they can do in response is die on its shores.