Valhalla Rising (2009)

Television's Hannibal Lecter Mads Mikkelsen is One-Eye, the Viking ultimate fighting champion, a mysterious mute slave so dangerous he has to be kept in chains at all times - even when he fights.

Eventually he escapes captivity and after exacting revenge on his captors he - and the young lad who has been looking after him (Maarten Stevenson) - fall in with a bunch of Christian Vikings heading to the Holy Land to liberate Jerusalem.

Unfortunately once at sea they become lost in a mysterious fog and when they eventually make landfall it isn't the Middle East but the brave new world of the Americas.

Valhalla Rising is not your typical Viking movie. Languid, episodic and mesmerising, with minimal dialogue, it has far more in common with Aguirre, The Wrath Of God (and, by extension, Apocalypse Now) than, say, Pathfinder or Outlander - even down to the harassment from unseen, missile-firing enemies.

Mix in One-Eye's bloody prophetic visions (which he can't share with anyone, of course) and the occasional reality-challenging montage, such as the sequence where the Christians appear to be attacking each other as One-Eye constructs an impossible pillar of odd-shaped rocks, and you have a film that is far more mystical than mainstream.

It clearly all means something but I'm not entirely sure what - perhaps Mikkelsen's one-eyed berserker is meant to represent Odin of Norse mythology and the young boy is Thor?

Valhalla Rising is definitely a DVD that will require a second viewing - but with the commentary track turned on.

What isn't in doubt is the gorgeous, but bleak, landscapes against which everything is framed. The harsh elements are as much a factor as anything else in this atmospheric drama, even to the extent that there are no buildings featured at all; the characters never have any form of comfort. There are also no women involved either.

Anyone coming to this expecting massive battle scenes, constant clashes between hordes of blood-soaked Vikings and a fast-and-furious action-adventure will be disappointed, but if you are open to something a bit different then you might find Valhalla Rising piquing your interest.

Aguirre, The Wrath Of God (1972)

Set deep in the Amazonian rainforests of South America in the mid-16th Century, Werner Herzog's Aguirre, The Wrath Of God is a mesmerizing tale of an adventurer's descent into his own "heart of darkness" and the fate of those he pulls along with him.

Fresh from his conquest of the Incas, Gonzalo Pizarro (Allejandro Repulles) leads his army down the Andes and into the jungle, searching for the legendary city of gold, El Dorado.

The film opens with a languid scene of Pizarro's forces, with their cannons, Indian slaves and supplies, snaking down the mountain side and this quickly establishes the pace that Herzog adopts for this movie.

After a while hacking through the jungle, Pizzaro calls a halt to his expedition and decides to send off a small unit to scout ahead and hopefully learn the location of El Dorado and the disposition of hostile natives in the area.

Leading the group are Don Pedro de Ursúa (Ruy Guerra) - who has brought his mistress along with him, Inez de Atienza (Helena Rojo) - Lope de Aguirre (Klaus Kinsi) - who is accompanied by his 15-year-old daughter, Florés (Cecilia Rivera - and, representing Spanish royalty, nobleman Don Fernando de Guzmán (Peter Berling).

The group heads off on rafts down the river and it's not long before it becomes clear that the already slightly unbalanced Aguirre is determined to undermine his commander, Don Pedro, and take control of the group.

However, he's a canny old sod and orchestrates events so that although Don Pedro is usurped, Don Fernando is put in charge and the group declares itself independent of Spain with Don Fernando as the first emperor of El Dorado.

From there, the film is a series of random encounters as the group drifts down river, plagued by diminishing supplies and harassed by (mostly) unseen natives who pepper them with darts, arrows and spears.

For a film about conquistadors there is little to no actual fighting, although a lot of guns and cannons are fired, because Aguirre's party seldom meets face-to-face any of the people they are trying to conquer and convert to Christianity.

As their adventure continues and the group gets whittled down, so Aguirre's insanity increases and he starts making increasingly bizarre proclamations, as their progress becomes more and more dream-like.

Many, many scenes go on for just a bit too long, just enough time for the audience's mind to start questioning 'what's going on? why am I watching this?'

And the reason you stay watching Aguirre, The Wrath Of God is that it is incredibly compelling.

Filmed entirely on location in the Peruvian rainforest, on tributaries of the Amazon River, there is an almost documentary-like quality to the film's reality.

This is further heightened by Kinski's understated portrayal of Aguirre, a man of incredible charisma and intelligence who is also clearly several cards short of a full deck.

Although far from a silent movie, much emphasis is placed upon silence and the measured dialogue manages to embrace such topics as power, religion, corruption, megalomania and hallucination.

There are obvious comparisons to Apocalypse Now (which was based, in part, on this movie, as well as Joseph Conrad's Heart Of Darkness), both on screen and in the tales of behind-the-scenes antics getting the movie made, although Aguirre relies more on atmosphere and less on an enigmatic protagonist - in a sense Kinski is both Martin Sheen's and Marlon Brando's characters, as both the explorer and the person driven insane by what he finds.

This certainly isn't a film for a casual viewer or those who need "all-action, all-the-time", but as a fictionalised account of how such an expedition, led by a powerful figure such as Aguirre, could go so inevitably wrong, then this is interesting viewing.