Kill James Bond! - S3E19.5: The Northman [PREVIEW]

Episode Date: May 16, 2024

After watching Beowulf, we decided to take a look at another recent film about the Vikings. A film lauded as an extremely accurate depiction of a 80-IQ ripped guy eating shit constantly in service of righting a wrong that was already righted while he wasn't paying attention. Is it fascist? Maybe. Maybe it's good though, ever thought of that? ----- FREE PALESTINE Hey, Devon here. Give money to people crowdfunding for passage out of Rafah first and foremost. While the crossing might be closed, the situation is changing by the day and being able to afford passage out when the crossing reopens is an immense comfort. then purchase ESIMs, then donate to this link if you feel you need a big name attached to the fund to trust it. Please don't only donate money. You have to do other things now. https://www.map.org.uk/donate/donate ----- A New place to listen! Our entire backlog has been ported over to youtube, and can be found here! ----- Consider supporting us on our reasonably-priced patreon! https://www.patreon.com/killjamesbond ------ WEB DESIGN ALERT  Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/   Kill James Bond is hosted by November Kelly, Abigail Thorn, and Devon. You can find us at https://killjamesbond.com

INTRO Let me tell you a story, listener, of three brave podcasters, surely destined for valor. Noir. Oh my god, that's so... I'm so, so glad I cleared that lump in my throat. Hi listeners, how's it going? I should never have let you take a hit of my vape. It does this to everyone, y'know, it's fine.

KAYLEE Shut the fucking government. ALICE It's Kale James Bond, it's a bonus episode, it's Devon's pick, and Devon picked the Northmen. We are on some Norse shit, a little like season within a season. Of VKing. We're doing some like Scandinavian content. NARES Indeed. Yeah, as you all will have heard, I had such a good time doing Beowulf that I decided to examine a sort of counterpart to it in

The Northmen. ALICE Yeah. SONIA A better film, in most if not always. ALICE Yeah, absolutely. A more interesting film to talk about, I think. SONIA Yes, definitely. ALICE This is a Robert Eggers film, and I wanna say upfront something that Robert Eggers did say, which is at the premiere of this, he's like, I hate the way in which Norse culture has been appropriated by the far right, and I'm repulsed by that, and I wanna make a movie

that doesn't do that. And I think ultimately one of the things we're gonna be talking about in the course of this episode is how successful he was or wasn't in doing that. Because I've watched this movie before, I remember thinking it was visually impactful, right? Very very accurate and well-observed and stuff, and details. But politically a bit... Ugh. Yeah, I'm glad he said that, I feel that effort perhaps didn't come across in what was on

screen, I can think of a few ways in which it would've been, y'know, maybe more obvious that that's what you're trying to do with it, but I certainly appreciate the effort. Absolutely. And this was his first, like, huge budget movie, right, after the Vvitch, whatever the other one was. This one had like ten times the budget. I mean, Cards on the Table, this is exactly the kind of movie I would want to be in, it Right. After the Vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE EEEEE E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E E A silver screen. A silver screen. Hair, you know, dreams, whatever, the Nicole Kidman thing. Nicole Kidman's in this, by the way. She is. With an insane weave.

The longest, waviest hair, it looks real bad. Yeah, props to the wig makers, as always. Yes. So we begin in 9th century Sweden, in Raffensee, where our kid hero is waiting for his, like, Fikinger father to return from raiding, enslaving, pillaging, looting, raping, all of this. Mmhm. He's just finished Viking, and he's coming back to... Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. Yeah. And his mother, Queen Gudrun, Nicole Kidman, is there, and he, like, walks in on her changing and she's like, never walk in on me changing for reasons that will become apparent later. Trans woman. And, couple of things up front, right? First of all, slavery in the Viking world. Like, gonna be very very important to talk about.

Real and profoundly like, inextricable part of the reason why Norse Age had so many raids is to gather slaves, particularly women, which is something we're gonna be talking about, we're gonna be talking about Viking misogyny and gender roles in Norse societies. So we upfront show that this has been a raid to gather slaves and loot and treasure. RILEY Yes. Yeah. So much like the witch, much was made of this film's historical accuracy, how much they researched the look and feel of things, such that one of my first notes that I've written is just, what were they doing in the

past, man? Crazy! Yeah, no, it just looks shit. Yo, it's crazy, though. Looks awful. The past is a foreign country, it is also literally a foreign country, but also like, come on, what are you guys fucking doing, this is so weird. It's crazy.

Sweden is a foreign country. The thing is, I haven't thought about accuracy, and I was gonna bring this up later, but I'll just put it in now, right? So much of this stuff is, like, seriously historically attested. Eggers worked with a couple of Viking historians on this, particularly the guy, I forget his name, he wrote Children of Ashen Elm, which is like, the book if you wanna start reading about Vikings, right? So a lot of this stuff is like...

RILEY Neil Price, I'm seeing. ALICE Neil Price, thank you. The designs of the armour and the helmets and the clothes and stuff is very very accurate. This is kind of emblematic of the whole thing for me, there's a bit where Nicole Kidman, as Queen Gudrun, is weaving in the middle of a conversation, and she's tablet weaving. Which is an entirely accurate thing, and that's out there for the real tablet weaving heads to be like, yo, they fucking got the correct kind of weaving in the thing! And I think maybe sometimes you can be too accurate, is my contention, because this is

here for all the people who really want to see an extremely well researched and accurate kind of like, this is the stuff that Vikings had, this is the stuff that they did. And I think it kind of harms the story in some ways. Because I think sometimes some of the attention is put on, we have the correct kind of weaving, without thinking about any of the kind of sociopolitical implications, if you know what I mean. RILEY Do we have the correct kind of writing, though? I wouldn't worry about it. Yeah, no, I completely agree with you, actually. I'll get into it a lot later.

He tried to go even more so with this, like, they recorded the dialogue originally, like, Old Norse, and the test audiences were like, what the fuck is this, all of these motherfuckers are speaking Swedish, I don't understand a word that's happening. And so they had to ADR in, like, English dialogue. Which is... ALICE Wow, seriously. That's... ALICE Yeah. It's really well done, you wouldn't be able to tell, but like...

ALICE I really appreciate film and TV makers who put in, like, a huge amount of absolutely Herculean effort. It's just cool, it's so cool. Like, something I really appreciate about this is, as I did with The Witch, the lighting. A lot of the lighting is done with like natural light, like by firelight, and it's like, oh that's so difficult to do. It's like, it's like seeing the Sistine Chapel, it's like, oh I don't really agree with the message necessarily, but like good effort. Yeah, absolutely. A pretty strong stance of mine is, obviously I disagree

with like the corporatization of these things, I think that if you make a completely unintelligible movie in Old Norse, that's good. And the audiences are wronged for wanting it to be in English, quite frankly. ALICE I think Robert Eggers kind of went- RILEY It's cool as hell. ALICE A bit Harold Sucasa with this, like he actually became a Norse warrior in order to make this movie. RILEY Yes.

ALICE I don't support Robert Eggers' policy of conducting a series of seaborne raids against vulnerable monasteries on the northeastern coast of Scotland and England, but you do have to say it led to a very accurate movie. It's true, yeah. Something else I really enjoy about this film is it has a very present soundtrack. Like we get a lot of long tracking shots, a lot of like big shots of the village and so on, which Eggers loves to do, a lot of like smooth dolly stuff, the camera is very serene often in contrast to the action, which is very frenetic. But then

as all that's happening you get a lot of like, DEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEic chanting ensemble again. Yeah, exactly, like we said, you're always getting work. Mmhm. You're like the guy that does the sort of, in a world voice in trailers, you're always gonna get work. Yeah. King Ethan Hawke returns from Viking. Hell yeah. Fuck yeah.

Yeah! To Queen Nicole Kidman and his son, and his Queen is not entirely happy to see him. This is fairly obvious. But his son is, his son who is overawed by him and loves his father. This is Amleth. The pronunciation T-H-E-, it's part of a saga, a couple of sagas actually. SONIA Damn, really, cool. ALICE Yeah, that's where Shakespeare gets Hamlet from, is Hamlet.

SONIA Yeah, I guess it was kind of an interesting and possibly sensible choice that the plot of the film, with like the young prince who has a wicked uncle and so on, it's like pretty obvious from the get-go what's gonna happen. And maybe that's a sensible choice given that the setting is so accurate and, as we say, the past is a foreign country. Maybe it's a good idea, actually, to make the story quite like, by the numbers. ALICE I think it's an attempt to kind of turn, to do a detournement of the saga, right, in an interesting way. RILEY Yes, 100%.

ALICE I don't know that it's a successful one, but it's the idea, right? Because you have the kind of fair-haired king, his queen, who like, the first thing that's going wrong in this story essentially is that his queen's like, oh, this bitch is back again. Yeah, so, oh great. Yep. On cue you also have the kind of scruffy, dark-haired, sinister, mylis, I'm about to

betray your ass, brother. This is Fiona. Fiona, yes. Fiona. betray your ass, brother. This is Fiona, Fiona, yes. Fionna. Fionna who enters the meat hall as they're sort of like feasting, looking like the most I am about to betray you, man. This Jafar ass motherfuck. Yeah.

Yes. Whoa there. If you wanna hear the rest of this episode, and hear 50 solid minutes of me attempting to defend this fascist movie from my two friends calling it fascist, then you're gonna have to head on over to patreon.com slash killjamesbond all one word and sign up today for just five pounds a month. Five pounds! That is barely a coffee these days. It's pretty cheap really when you think about it.