Severed Ways: The Norse Discovery of America (2009)

Sorry for the 'spoiler'. Excessive camera work, editing tricks and pushing the envelope of film taboos do not work with what is a period adventure drama. My spoiler - I stopped watching when we got an up close and personal shot of one of the vikings naked bum while he was evacuating. Meaning a graphic filming of voiding his intestinal tract.... I hope you don't get the picture, if you know what I mean. To bring an experimental style to a period piece requires careful consideration and a less is more approach. I do give points to the author for using an actual historical person, Thorfinn Karlsefni. His story is found in Eric the Red's Saga and Saga of Olaf Tryggvason... This story had and maybe has a lot of promise. Maybe somehow it can be resurrected.

Well I wouldn't be nearly as brutal as some of the reviewers. I actually ended up liking this movie quite a bit. I didn't bail out on the initial shaky cam beach scene once I started recognizing this as an art statement more than anything. The movie is quite haunting if you allow yourself to feel what these poor lost vikings might have really felt in such a distant forlorn place. The sense of desolation is something I empathize with (I'm a big Alaska tourist fan) and the medieval history is also something I'm quite fond of. So yes, maybe your average movie goer is probably going to quickly bail out on the viewing. For me, the movie is quite a different experience, shows brutally honest depictions of some natural acts, and ends on a complete note of frustration as it should. I felt the writer/director had a complete sense of the psychology of this historical experience that I enjoyed watching.

I saw Severed Ways in theater a couple of weeks ago and haven't been able to get it out of my mind since. Of course it has it's flaws but keep in mind this was the director's (Stone) first feature and an extremely ambitious one at that.I'm so sick of seeing the same old independent garbage. Boy loves girl. Girl doesn't love boy but she loves Belle and Sebastion. Somebody makes a phone call on the hamburger phone to someone else who is a dying and pregnant and its official everyone loves Zooey Deschanel. Severed Ways is a Viking period piece made by a crew of about 8 people. How's that even possible. The soundtrack has Norwegian Black Metal and Judas Priest. Amazing! I thought the use of low def digital video wouldn't work for a period piece but the way it allowed the film to be shot with little to no lighting made it feel more authentic. The cinematography was beautiful even though sometimes the high shutter speed made it a little hard on the eyes. All in all Severed Ways is a step in the right direction for independent cinema. It's something new and different and I appreciate that. I know people will have trouble with pacing of the film but it's obvious that its deliberate and an attempt to show how two men would try to live off of a land they are not accustomed to. Sometimes the film took a comedic turn which took me out of the film a bit but it would eventually pull me back in. I'm excited to see what's next for these extremely independent young filmmakers.

There obviously were some major exploratory discoveries unrecorded in history that no human being alive today knows about. This movie depicts one of them and the subtitle gives it its significance. The two lost Vikings represent two elements that have created the American character, the heathen and the Christian, both so western in character. Here we see the first dude on our soil. We graphically see the most important defecation in the history of North America, the first human waste to touch and fertilize its soil and perhaps ultimately to make it toxic. The defecation becomes a ritual act. If guns, germs and steel conquered the North American wilderness, here we have only steel and no long term conquest; The sound of steel on wood is an underlying rhythm in the film. And it is very prescient that some of the chopping is mindless. The sound of the axes is woven into the incredible sound track. The film is very much about music. It is the exquisite lyrical blending of music and image that make this movie totally mesmerizing. Very little dialogue is needed and very little is supplied. This movie is not for film illiterates who think that the best of the best of the Dogma films is just unsteady camera work. This film will polarize the audience and separate the mindful from the mindless. The mindful being those who will love this genre creating movie.