"The Northman" is very impressive, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's especially good. It's visceral. It may be very very historically accurate, by today's lights. The battle choreography is estimable, shot in long takes with little editing. A number of excellent actors do a lot of really fine work in the parts that have words. The vistas are dark, suggestive, beautifully filmed. It has all that in its favor.

"The Northman" is also Very Serious. It is Very Very Serious. It's SO VERY Serious. There is not a moment of levity or self-awareness anywhere, ever. By the time someone in our audience finally giggled, because you have to sooner or later, it's all so completely preposterous, we all fell deathly silent. Was this the moment when the mood would be finally, ruinously broken? And it wasn't, though it was close - there really is too much about this that works to let it all fall apart completely.

In that moment, though, I realized that I had been willing myself to stay locked in for a while, trying to ignore the fact that this movie had derailed long since, about when it went from being a low-tech muddy "Dune" kind of thing and went over into "Hannibal" territory. In other words, I had been doing the hard disruptive work of pretending that this was Serious, Quality Stuff. But no, people, no. That's _the movie's_ job, not mine. The movie should be giving me a terrific and unexpected ride, not asking me to push it uphill. If I have to sit there and hope that it doesn't shatter completely into pieces, it's already a loss. I'm not here to eat my spinach because it's good for me. I want to watch someone's brilliant work, not sustain it.

When we eventually reached the final showdown, in which two naked men scream incoherently and batter one another with swords and shields on the shadowy fiery skirts of an active flowing volcano, I was long past caring. My personal movie had ended an easy 20 minutes earlier. I'm not kidding about screaming incoherently either - there is no dialogue. It just goes, "AAAAAHHHH!" *smash* "RRYYAAARGH!" *smash* "WRRRHYYOOOOGHHHH!" *smash*, for like ten minutes. Or maybe it's five. Or three. Whatever. I thought it would never end.

There really is a lot of good stuff that works in "The Northman," and maybe one day when I'm home with a good beverage and a comfy chair I'll watch some of it again to look at Robert Eggers' layouts and some of the marvelous and unexpected performances. Maybe. Until then, what the movie mostly did was remind me, over and over and over again, just how amazing "The Green Knight" really was.