Schmollywood Babylon

Ragnarok (Mikkel Brænne Sandemose, 2013)

A friend showed me the trailer for Ragnarok and the next day I owned the Norwegian blu-ray. That’s how I roll, fast and brutal. Anyway, this film is out right now in the US, on VOD, theaters etc, but I couldn’t wait. No siree, I just couldn’t wait to own it. So what’s odd with this film? It’s family entertainment, but it’s also a monster film… so I couldn’t stop myself. Magnet Releasing in the US is also comparing it with Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park and The Goonies...which is a bit cocky considering it’s nothing like it. Especially not the last two! But fuck that, what we have here is a quite well-made family adventure which lives mostly on the gorgeous locations, and for me deep forests and valleys is enough to like a movie.

Sigurd (Pål Sverre Hagen) is an archaeologist who’s obsessed by the Oseberg Ship (a real viking ship found in 1904) and he’s sure it has more to tell then what everyone even can imagine. When an additional rune stone is found in the north of Norway, in Finnmarken, it delivers the last key to the mystery and he, his two kids, his best buddy and assistant travels out in the wilderness to try to find out what the stone wants to say and if there’s any clue to what Ragnarok actually was… maybe there’s some truth about the end of the world anyway?

Ragnarok sure looks good. It actually looks fabulous and that alone would generate some positive reviews. I liked it also, but at the end I felt it was missing something. Maybe it was the involvement of Swedish money and creative forces, because where the movie would have gone one step more into awesome territory it steps back like there was a boring Swedish producer standing in the background somewhere complaining it’s not real enough for him. The presence of Sofia Helin, who is a terrible, terrible, terrible Swedish actress gives the movie an even more awkward atmosphere and it seems to spread to leading man Pål Sverre Hagen who mostly stares and blinks very slowly. I like Bjørn Sundquist, who plays the guide, but his character is also very underwritten and when he finally leaves the story he’s instantly forgotten. The best actors are actually the kids - who manages to be 100% non-annoying. Also watch out for Jens Hultén (who I actually made a very bad movie with many years ago) as a viking in the flashbacks, he’s a great actor - but could have used more screentime.

Ragnarok creates a nice mystery and builds slowly up to some cool revelations. The idea of the Soviet/Norwegian no mans land is cool and the sets and locations are super-classy and triggers the imagination. When the monster finally appears it looks great, in the same quality as bigger movies from Hollywood. It actually looks damn nice! The action is nice and it’s never really boring, but still…fuck, they could have done so much more! Why not let the monster hunt them into town? Now it’s just a couple of trees getting damaged - and the inside of a Soviet bunker. The characters aren’t interesting enough to root for, so why not some more destruction instead?

If it did continue the build-up the way it should have been and not became more Swedish at the end it would have been much, much better. Now it’s a good movie, well-made and delivers some fun. It’s also great they’ve took the time to make a blockbuster-type of movie in Scandinavia about local mythology.

But that’s it. A pity.

Blindpassasjer (Stein-Roger Bull, 1978)

This is the second time I’ve seen Blindpassasjer, a norwegian science fiction-series from 1978. Broadcasted in three episodes, all with classic cliffhangers. I can’t even imagine what an impact this production must have made in Norway in 1978, it’s still a small country and it must have been very rare with something like this on NRK, the Norwegian public television. It's reminds me a lot of those classic british TV-dramas from the seventies (I’m looking at you, Nigel Kneale), and has the same visual style and atmosphere. It's like Doctor Who - but a bit more stylish in my personal opinion. Even if the sets are cheap, they feel thought-through...in that glorious, wonderful futuristic 70’s way.

We follow the spaceship Marco Polo from it's journey from the planet Rossum - a farmer-based planet ruled by primitive robots. But something is of course strange with the planet. During deep sleep an unknown entity, a "biomat", sneak aboard the ship and kills one of the crews, stuffs the person in the garbage disposer and takes it's identity. When the crew wakes up and discovers that someone is aboard the ship it's already too late. One of them is the "biomat"... an perfect replica of a human being... Now they have twenty hours to discover who it is, or else the space station Nexus will blow them up. Everything to stop the infection to reach earth...

It echoes of The Thing and Alien (especially the later, but Alien it was released the year after), but it's more of a whodunit set in space. The special effects are uneven, of course. Some of it looks great - especially the miniatures and the sets, but the visual effects and the graphics are very, very primitive. But I don't care of course, it's all about the story. And the story is very well-written, telling it with only the most necessary scenes. There’s not fillers, nothing you don’t need to see. I love it! Another film it reminds me of is Marek Piestrak’s excellent 1978 sci-fi Test Pilota Pirxa, which of course is based upon a short story by Stanislaw Lem. It’s the same kind of paranoia and my favorite kind of future, the socialistic and slightly grey.

The cast is a few of norways best actors, and Björn Floberg is probably the most famous of them. Henny Moan, who plays "Leda", also starred in one of the biggest horror classics from Norway, the 1958 De Dødes tjern (aka The Lake of the Damned). The acting is unusually naturalistic, close to sleepy - but it just fits the style. There’s very few big show-offs here, the actors own their parts with confidence and takes them to the end without losing their goal.

There's a few great twists and creepy sequences also, not unusal in these TV-productions (it’s something with the analog, video-quality, that makes everything more realistic and in-your-face without being that spectacular) one of my favorites is when one of the characters goes to an unknown spaceship that they found floating in space, and with a videokamera (much like in the found footage genre) examine the ship and what’s hidden inside.

Like with Doctor Who and many British productions the lack of budget almost seems to boost the quality on the script, and like those Blindpassasjer is filled with great ideas and eerie moments. It’s not without cheese of course, but that comes with the kind of production it is. If you can find it with English subs it’s worth watching. I, for one, must rely on my Norwegian blood to understand the carefully constructed dialogue and twists without subs.

It might stretch my power as a movie geek here now, but I would say that Blindpassasjer is one of the finer European TV-productions of the 70’s, a show that manages to be both immensely entertaining and of superior quality.