It's easy to see that they have made an effort with the scenery and so on, still I feel the film looks kind of bland, and the acting is often on a boys' books level. It just doesn't find a language that really feels like its own - that is not to say it should have been what's called and "artsy movie" but a pulse and a way of telling it that one felt is its own, that sets it apart from just any tv series or Ivanhoe version. The medieval setting is steeped in clichés, the duel and the nunnery scenes were so over the top - and I always had the feeling that the characters are speaking straight off the scriptbook. There's also a surprising lack of really good and feverish action scenes, we demand more today than this lukewarm battle in the Judaean pass or the, well, silly killing of the king at Visingsö. Some of this is also due to unimaginative, too featureless and glossy camera work and costuming.
The film clearly had a problem with the books being so well known in Sweden, and the fact that it would also be screened as a tv series: that would breed a feeling that "we can't change or condense anything or people will go mad". Most of the time, you have to change things around a bit when you're filming a book, or the movie will feel stiff, fussy or even hard to follow.
Actually I think Jan Troell's adaptation of Vilhelm Moberg's Emigrants cycle had a similar problem and suffered for it, though those two films have far better acting and production values - I still feel they are kind of unduly tied to the books, and would be hard to follow sometimes if you haven't read the novels.
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furienna
16 years ago
Well, when I watch a movie adaption of a book, I want to see the novel in motion, not some screen writer's new version of it. So I've always liked it, when a movie follows the novel closely, because that's what I think they should do. And I always thought the action scenes were the most boring parts of the book, so I think the action scenes we get to see in the movie are totally sufficient.
Yes, it's true! IMDB has reached Sweden!
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Strausszek
16 years ago
Well, then we're not looking for quite the same. I think a movie should reinvent the story, in a way, give a feeling that this is happening right here and now, it's unrolling here and doesn't just rely on the book, so we donä't know exactly what will happen next or how it will happen (like, dialogie that's written in a book often won't work on film without some changes). I think LOTR did that brilliantly, it cut away some of the story elements and made it breathe. The Bourne Identity, too: it brioke free from both Ludlum's nook and th earlier tv mini with Richard Chamberlain - both of those had been made during the Cold war, but the new film changes around some things, the villain in particular, to give it a more contmporary vibe. But of vcourse that's hard to do when you have a rather new bestseller of this kind (with LOTR there was a distance of fifty years between book and film).
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