Past Misdeeds: A Viking Saga: The Darkest Day (2013)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

It's 793, and a band of Vikings led by Athelstan (Christopher Godwin) has just raided the abbey of Lindisfarne off the northeast coast of England. Athelstan is obsessed with the idea that acquiring the Lindisfarne Gospels will give him the power to make his son the ruler of England, perhaps even of the whole of the British Isles. His plan's a bit like my last Crusader Kings II run-through, really. Unfortunately for him, all his slaughtering of unarmed monks has been for naught, for an elderly monk and what amounts to his adoptive son Hereward (Marc Pickering) have escaped with the mission to carry the Gospels the long way to safety - to Iona off the west coast of Scotland.

The monks are supposed to meet up with a group of armed protectors in a nearby ruin, but the protectors had their own encounter with Vikings that left only one warrior, Aethelwulf (Mark Lewis Jones) alive. A small group of Athelstan's men are following the trio through the woods that make up most of England at the time, not all of them happy with their leader's plan. But after Athelstan's son is killed by Aethelwulf in an encounter that leaves the old monk raped and dead and Hereward well on the way to PTSD, there's no holding him back anymore; he'd probably go to the Holy Land itself to get it back now.

Hereward and Aethelwulf for their part have additional problems to being followed by a small group of brutal maniacs, for Saxon England is pretty much a hell hole, full of bandits, desperate religious maniacs, and so much death and destruction Hereward will have to give up at least parts of his soft-spoken and slightly naive approach to Christianity and life (a poison-induced vision of Christ helps there too). On their way, our protagonists also encounter the Pictish "witch" Eara (Elen Rhys) who demonstrates a rather different approach to paganism than the Vikings have to offer.

Chris Crow's A Viking Saga: The Darkest Day is not at all the film I expected. What I expected was an Asylum-like attempt to cash in on Hammer of the Gods at worst, a fun piece of medieval hack and slash at best. This was before I actually saw Hammer of the Gods and realized not even the part of The Asylum responsible for that horrible Sherlock Holmes film could manage to create something worse than that, nor would anyone in possession even a mild degree of sanity try to rip that thing off.

What I got with The Darkest Day however, is a film exceedingly interested in exploring various directions of the early medieval mind set (of course a thing we can never do more than make informed speculations about), taking great care to take its characters' various ways of filtering the world through their ideas and beliefs very seriously. Doing this, the film avoids looking down on the characters for what they believe in, yet also avoids to agree with these beliefs as objective truth. On paper, you could read the film, particularly Hereward's character development, as a defence of violent Christianity, but I assume it is rather trying not to let the way its medieval characters develop become too influenced by our contemporary views. This attempt to stay - at least to a degree - true to a medieval mind set, is quite effective, I think.

In fact, one of the film's strong suits is how it gives the characters’ various world views (and at that point in human development, religion in one form or the other was the natural seeming basis for seeing the world, for better as well as for worse) space, and takes a look at what happens when they are confronted with the facts of life of a horrifying and violent time. It has to be said that the film's title is a bit of a lie: this is no Viking saga. The Vikings are pretty much the designated bad guys here (something of a pleasant change of pace after one too many Viking metal glorifications of a people who were about as sympathetic as any Christian crusader, though did indeed write some greats sagas), and while the film spends some time with them, it's Hereward and the people he encounters who are the film's protagonists and targets of audience sympathy. Crow does spend time to give the Vikings actual motives, though, and while we're clearly supposed to like them less, he does leave them their humanity.

When it comes to the violence, Crow goes for short, intense bursts of it which emphasise brutality and desperation, with people struggling, biting and scratching for their lives until it ends cruelly and suddenly. As befits the tone of the film, there's no elegance and beauty in killing here but a mixture of desperation, cruelty and necessity. I was quite surprised to find a male-on-male rape scene in the film used to double down on the fact that violence really is not a fun thing; like it goes with all rape scenes, it's not exactly something I was clamouring to watch, but it also very much belongs to the world the film takes place in, and therefore needs to be shown.

The only flaw worth mentioning I can find in The Darkest Day is the usual insistence on using the monochromatic colour schemes so beloved of contemporary filmmakers as a cheap and easy way to build mood. This method can still be effective, but has mostly become a boring short hand that only displays a lack of visual imagination and tends to bring up the question why the hell you'd shoot a film in colour when you then won't actually use colours, or even colour contrasts. In The Darkest Day's particular case, I can't help but think that these monochrome ways are actually weakening the impact the awesomely bleak landscape (somewhere in South Wales, the IMDB says) the film was shot in could otherwise have had.


However, I don't want to end on this somewhat sour note, for if I'm not able to accept the use of short cuts in a low budget movie willing to put this much thought and actual emotional power into so many of its other aspects as The Darkest Day is, where would that leave me as a film fan?