how and when. As the Viking theme has become popular on the various platforms, we already have a notion of the usual ingredients to use: oracles, Berserker rituals, Viking explorations and their ferocity as warriors.
THE NORTHMAN, VIKING HAMLET Maestro Jesús Ricardo Félix
CELLULOID If we had to explain what Hamlet is about, we would say that the play deals with the story of a prince of Denmark who, without having resolved the mourning for the loss of his father, realizes that he was murdered and that the culprit is not only his relative but also he has married the queen, his mother. This classic Shakespearean drama has been brought to the cinema by directors such as Franco Zeffirelli, played by actors such as Laurence Olivier, Mel Gibson, although it is said that the Russian version by Grigori Kozintsev has been one of the best achieved. I prefer the nineties version of Kenneth Branagh because it seems to be more faithful to the original text of the work. The truth is that taking a Shakespeare play to the cinema with everything and his poetry must be quite a feat. In Shakespeare the word subtracts prominence from the image, producers concerned about box office losses seek to add some action there, special effects there. But if you were told that the famous English playwright was inspired by a Norse legend about a prince named Amleth, it would give an unexpected twist to the story. That is why this week we will talk about our Viking Hamlet: The Northman. The Northman is a 2022 AmericanBritish production directed by Robert Eggers. Eggers is a fairly young director
who has films like The Witch and The Lighthouse under his resume, which can be classified in the horror or psychological horror genre. The protagonist of the story, Prince Amleth is played by Swedish actor Alexander Skarsgård. In the role of Olga, Amleth's partner, Anya Taylor-Joy, an actress who made her debut in the film The Witch alongside Eggers, was chosen.
Definitely recommendable, Eggers was not given full control over the production of Viking Hamlet, he himself admits that he had no say in the final edition. Despite this, he enjoys the aesthetic quality of the final result, which is a mixture of action, with a lot of blood, with romance, with fantasy, but without becoming a special effects movie. He clarified that the public related to Viking stories will enjoy it much more and will remember movies like Conan the Barbarian, 13 warriors and even The Lion King with everything and his Scar.
The rest of the cast is made up of Nicole Kidman as the prince's mother, Ethan Hawke as the betrayed king, Claes Bang as Fjölnir the villainous uncle. Willem Dafoe plays the role of Heimir, a kind of visionary who accompanies the adventures of the Viking prince. Out there, hardly recognizable, Björk appears to us as a witch who predicts the future of Amleth. Within the cast that I think is very well balanced, more experienced figures such as Kidman and Dafoe stand out. As the play is inspired by Hamlet or Hamlet in Amleth the story is about revenge, death, madness. Robert Eggers enjoys a certain technical elegance but since it is a Viking story, blood cannot be missing, so we see a combination of high technical quality cinema with scenes of primitive Viking rituals. Just as in the Greek theater we already know what to expect, so in the case of Prince Amleth's revenge we have an idea beforehand where the story is going, even so it makes us curious about the
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