best post war icelandic movie ever
"well, then i'm back on this devil island" say all it have to say. Extraordinary movie
shareI haven't watched any other Icelandic movies, as far as I know, but I'm sure that this can't be the best, unless you are talking purely in terms of its production qualities.
When I watched this movie it reminded me of Angela's Ashes and Once were Warriors, in that by halfway through the movie I had lost all sympathy for the characters and just wished that someone would beat sense into them or put them out of their misery.
This I suspect had less to do with the characters themselves and much more to do with the biased and predjudicial way in which the characters were portrayed and the things they were portrayed doing. I'm left wondering if what I saw was a representative picture of what their lives were really like because if it is so then I don't understand why the film was made other than to give those involved something to do. It's not that I want a happy ending I just require something more out a film than what I could get from watching drunken tramps on the London underground.
The movie was depressing and mindlessly pointless, there was no real depth to any of the characters, you were shown nothing of their lives other than the drinking and violence. It was almost as if they didn't have any thought processes and were basically automitons going through the same things day in day out without any will to make things better.
I'm not saying that the film was badly made, or that the actors didn't do a good job or that some of the pieces weren't good, I'm just saying that as a whole the film didn't really say anything, didn't really go anywhere and left me with a feeling that I had been robbed of an opportunity to learn something about Icelandic culture - or am I supposed to believe that this consists only of getting drunk, getting violent and desperately wanting to be American without either understanding what that is or being willing to do anything about it.
Angela's Ashes had a point in that it is possible to escape the alcohol fuelled squalor and ensuing poverty.
Devils Island only says that alcohol makes for poor judgement and a willingness to engage in violence, something that even the most dullwitted among us already knows by now.