One such source was the work of Saxo Grammaticus, whose Gesta Danorum indirectly inspired Hamlet. The Northman liberally quotes from the original Amleth, where The Lion King uses Shakespeare as a starting point. This episode of The GMR reviews their exploration of vengeance as a dramatic hinge upon which to base their stories.
The Lion King, being a Disney animated feature, is a much tamer and family-friendly telling of the same essential story as The Northman, but both films are exciting and sometimes melancholy explorations of family, justice and revenge.
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[00:00:00] This is the GMR, The Generations Movie Review Podcast. Love, fate and vengeance are age-old themes explored in many films, books and TV shows that we watched today. Even Shakespeare took his inspiration from the lore of his time.
[00:00:19] On today's GMR we look at two films that start with the same source material but tell their stories in very different ways. Fair warning, the following conversation reveals plot details. I'm Lori Rollner and these are your hosts, Kyle Krantz and James Rollner.
[00:00:37] So Jim, why do you think stories about revenge have been prevalent and so popular throughout all of human history? Well it's eye for an eye, right? I mean that's going back to the Old Testament.
[00:00:54] Everybody starts with a vengeful and angry God and it works its way down to man from time immemorial, right? In the end everybody feels vengeance, everybody feels wronged, everybody feels a sense that they've been wronged and they want to take that out. They want their revenge.
[00:01:21] And it's of course been a popular subject in books, in plays, in movies, in regular conversation. I mean people have conversations all the time where they're like, I wish that jerk that cut me off on the highway, I'd like to cut him off.
[00:01:38] It percolates and operates and works through our everyday lives minute to minute. What you just said reminded me funnily enough of Orca Whales, which I know we discussed last podcast, but I was just thinking when you were saying that
[00:01:57] we know humans have these feelings of wanting revenge, whatever you would call that feeling. When I was doing research for the last episode, obviously talking about sharks and orcas and sea creatures for Jaws,
[00:02:15] what I remembered was I came across a story of an orca that attacked off the coast of Portugal in that area, pillars of Hercules like 20 years ago. It was hit by a boat and for the past 20 years, because she's the matriarch,
[00:02:34] her pod of orcas has just been attacking smaller boats. So I thought it was interesting and it's kind of like a good starting place.
[00:02:43] Like I think you got to reach a certain level of intelligence before revenge kind of becomes its own sort of emotion rather than just I'm being attacked.
[00:02:55] Here's a reaction, I'm going to escape, I'm going to fight revenge is like the next step where it's like you put a temporal element to it where it's like
[00:03:03] I was attacked in the past one, two, I remember I was attacked and three, I'm going to do something about that. Do you think vengeance is like a primordial emotion? Do you think it is base in everybody?
[00:03:21] Is that something that everybody feels does a priest feel the urge for vengeance? Does a child feel an urge for vengeance? Does your grandma feel an urge for vengeance? I think everyone has at some point, absolutely.
[00:03:38] But I think unlike being sad or being happy or even deeper, being hungry, I think revenge is kind of a merchant because when something gets more intelligent with bigger brains it starts to have ideas of like what happened in the past.
[00:03:57] Not just muscle memory of what happened in the past. Like, oh, if I see a creature I jump, right? If I see that poisonous frog I jump right away because something like that almost got me and my muscles kind of remember my lizard brain amygdala kind of remembers.
[00:04:11] I think as you get more intelligent and you could start to think about time kind of in a long linear line and you can start to attach memories to the past.
[00:04:20] I think when you can associate characters in the past that did negative things to you, that did wrong things to you, I think the idea and the feeling of revenge is just kind of emergent from that.
[00:04:34] That is to say I don't think it had any evolutionary advantages per se. Like I don't think it was something or an emotion that was chosen for or those that had it in the past bred more and that's why we have revenge.
[00:04:49] How could you not have revenge? If you didn't have revenge you'd have to be someone that processes your emotions completely and appropriately immediately so that when you look back at things that happened in the past you would already dealt with them. And they weren't lingering.
[00:05:06] Do you think that there's a source emotion that results in vengeance? Like does it start with humiliation? Does it start with embarrassment? Does it start with rejection? Yes.
[00:05:23] Yeah, no seriously. I think it could be a lot of things. I mean wars have been fought because people are angry or sad where they felt like their dignity was tarnished.
[00:05:35] I mean you want to explain why Caesar became dictator for life because he felt like his dignity was tarnished by the Senate.
[00:05:43] These are really strong emotions. So when you get those emotions that make up revenge, like I just said I think it's a component of emotions and time and then you remember our ability to remember the past but what emotions those are I think they could be multiple different emotions.
[00:06:00] I'm not advocating for revenge but couldn't revenge just be a form of justice? So Caesar just thought he was getting justice? Yes. The idea of revenge and justice is interesting because justice inherently removes personal revenge. That's not something that's legal anymore, at least in America. That's called vigilanteism.
[00:06:28] So it's like if someone breaks my arm like we're wrestling and then I go oh he broke my arm I'm going to do my own form of justice and take revenge on him. And break his arm.
[00:06:40] And break his arm you know that's what modern legal systems have strived to do for at least the past thousand years is give autonomy of violence to the state to be that intermediary so that people aren't seeking these personal blood oath revenge anymore.
[00:06:56] Let's explore that thread for a second because my initial answer to you started with the eye for an eye and that's biblical law. At what point did cultures and societies decide that having individual vengeance wasn't such a good idea?
[00:07:15] Because individuals are so different. If we were all roughly the same, like if we all looked the same acted the same were the same then revenge could be reliable and predictable.
[00:07:27] What the problem is is once you get enough people together the tail end incidents where someone steps on someone's toes so that person goes and murders their whole family those start to appear more and more and more often.
[00:07:41] But I think if I were to guess as to why you're not allowed to seek revenge anymore it's because of the personal filter for revenge. So my personal filter for being offended everyone has different layers to what they're offended by.
[00:07:59] Maybe I could say something so terrible to someone but to me it just seems normal like I'm just joking around. Like oh you seem down on your luck today.
[00:08:09] I mean what if I said that to someone and their whole life experience led them to think that I was giving them the greatest insult ever and thus they had a right to murder me.
[00:08:18] So I mean that I think at some point you get enough edge cases where not everyone is similar enough in the way we live our lives and our religions, our morals that that just doesn't make sense.
[00:08:30] And just individually as people I mean all throughout history people under for example the Christian banner have done so many different layers of violence and destruction right from completely peaceful to you know waging lots of war. Individuals have different ideas of what constitutes justice.
[00:08:51] They have different ideas of what constitutes fairness and I think that that also plays a role into why it's not a good idea for society to allow people to seek that sort of vengeance right.
[00:09:03] Because ultimately I can decide you know what you insulted my mother everybody dies today. That's not rational. That's not realistic. When it becomes a popularity contest if you can convince everyone else that you're justifying that's all that matters.
[00:09:21] I'm forgetting the details of what I'm about to say but there's a prohibition moonshine alcohol runner in the middle eight twenties who got caught and then the prohibition agent while he was in jail for two years. You know slept with his wife they eloped and got married.
[00:09:39] When the booze smuggler got out of prison he went and murdered both of them. And then the court sided with him and he didn't get in trouble for it. Yeah I know right but that's the point and that's within our modern legal system.
[00:09:55] Imagine if there wasn't a judicial system like we have someone like that could do much more damage as long as they got the popular consensus.
[00:10:05] So it used to be revenge equaled justice which was a form of law back in the day say the Roman times when if you would steal something you would get your hand cut off. So that's kind of revenge of the person you stole that from.
[00:10:25] They're saying well you can't steal anymore because I'm going to cut your hand off.
[00:10:28] And that was formalized into law and in fact they still have similar laws like that in places like Saudi Arabia today where it says explicitly if you steal from a merchant you could have your hand chopped off in the public square. Yeah.
[00:10:44] As a result if you're found guilty. And that's another factor too because the person seeking vengeance can't be the judge, jury and executioner all unto themselves. There has to be due process.
[00:10:58] There has to be a legal means of determining the receiver's guilt or innocence and for somebody just simply to take that upon themselves would not be true justice.
[00:11:14] We're trying to get more objective as time goes on and I think you know even 3000 years ago in Babylon you arrive at something like Hammurabi's Code which is like one of the first
[00:11:26] and certainly one of the most famous installations of some kind of objective law where it had rules like that because imagine if you stole something before Hammurabi's time and then that merchant went and murdered your whole family.
[00:11:41] You know because there were cases on other ways where they could say hey listen it was bad that he stole something but it was also bad or perhaps even worse that he murdered his whole family for that.
[00:11:51] So I think we've always had this idea of law or fairness in the sense of a scale. So if someone does something then in proportion something has to be done to them and we could see this today in the prison system.
[00:12:07] We go oh you stole something over $1000 that's one year in prison. Or hey this is actually a felony so this is even a level above petty theft or you know however all that stuff works I'm not attuned to it but we even do that today.
[00:12:24] Hey that crime is worth X amount kind of like a scale really. Let's take it from a slightly different perspective. If we look at literature perhaps one of the most famous stories of revenge is Hamlet written by William Shakespeare.
[00:12:44] That play is one of the longest plays in all of the repertoire and it was written at circa 1600. What do you think Shakespeare's relevance is today to people your age to society as a whole.
[00:13:00] Honestly I know that in my high school experience we didn't go over Shakespeare but frankly it wasn't that much because I was in high school late 2000s early 2010s.
[00:13:12] That would be the proper way to say it but when I was in high school I don't know I feel like Shakespeare's like a pinnacle of the English language in some senses. It's almost like a cliché.
[00:13:24] Yeah like it's incredibly highly influential guy but similarly it's when Shakespeare wrote his plays to be seen in the Globe Theater in Elizabethan England.
[00:13:37] So the farther we get away from that we're reading this play in a textbook and then the teacher calls on you in class and you say it and half the words aren't used in modern day English.
[00:13:51] I think it's incredibly interesting to study and his stories were certainly very influential on many of the English writers that came after him. But I think by the time I was in high school the hype train around that is sort of starting to die down.
[00:14:08] Well no and it's good you know you got to diversify a lot of a lot of writers have written in English since Shakespeare. Certainly one's more recent. One's that we can parse easier. And maybe are more relatable because the experience is closer in time.
[00:14:25] You read The Great Gatsby which took place a hundred years ago versus a Jane Austen novel which took some place some time before that.
[00:14:33] The whole point of language is to communicate effectively so I think he starts to lose a lot of people when they have to do work just to understand what you're saying.
[00:14:43] Like I said I'm a very amateur historian so I really do enjoy learning how people spoke back in the day. But similarly it's tough to sell that I think when you're just trying to build a foundational knowledge of English. What was it like when you were in school?
[00:15:01] You know in my life I've never actually directly read Shakespeare. I've seen adaptations of his work in film and I've obviously heard of him and I've done some light reading about him even though interestingly historians don't actually know that much about Shakespeare's personal life.
[00:15:22] They have some pretty basic appearances in the records of the time. And he was even an actor who performed in his own plays and he was quite successful at it in his lifetime.
[00:15:36] But much like Jesus a lot of what we take for granted as information about Shakespeare was written decades or more after his death.
[00:15:48] And there's a lot of cliche around who he was and what he did that isn't actually based in fact it's just things that people have been saying for hundreds of years about him.
[00:16:00] What you also got to take into account too is for most of history the only people that people cared about were extremely religious figures or noble people. That's the majority of histories based around those two groups of people.
[00:16:16] That's a great point and it's worth noting that hey that we're talking about a guy who was a writer. Yeah. 400 years ago who still has some comment worthy of him today.
[00:16:31] Well nowadays actors musicians there at the top of the social pyramid really but that's I want to stress that's frankly a modern phenomenon for most of history.
[00:16:43] If you were an actor and musician you were at the bottom of the social pyramid just because you were good at an instrument or wrote a popular play that didn't mean anything towards your social standing in society. No that's exactly right.
[00:16:58] In fact Mozart was a traveling musician who when he would play for royals throughout Europe would be fed with the servants in the kitchen. Well he will be for the rest of humanity more notable than the European royalty with which he was playing to.
[00:17:18] But again that's a cultural thing that didn't exist back then people didn't see Mozart for Mozart back then it was interesting and I certainly amongst artists musicians they ranked each other highly.
[00:17:30] It wasn't the huge cultural phenomenon where you have someone like Kanye West who's incredibly popular today and is incredibly rich and influential and there are plenty other artists like that.
[00:17:45] Or any of the Beatles who have been famous now for over 60 years and continue to be noteworthy in our culture amongst the most famous people that have ever lived it just by sheer volume of awareness. Shakespeare.
[00:18:04] Revenge and power are just some of the topics explored on the movies will be discussing on today's GMR. The first movie will be discussing is the animated Disney classic The Lion King. It was released in 1994 and it was directed by Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff.
[00:18:25] It stars Matthew Broderick, Jeremy Irons and James Earl Jones.
[00:18:31] The Lion King tells the story of Simba. He's intended to be the king but his father is struck down by his uncle and Simba finds himself in exile trying to figure out how he's going to reclaim his earned throne.
[00:18:49] Alright and the second movie will be discussing today is the modern Viking epic The Northman directed by Robert Eggers. It's written by Sean and Robert Eggers starring Alexander Skarsgard from True Blood if anyone remembers that. Nicole Kidman, Klass Bang, Ethan Hawke and Amia Taylor Joy.
[00:19:18] Alexander Skarsgard plays Amloth the son of a king who was murdered by his brother. In this story of revenge, Amloth goes on plenty of adventures seeking revenge for the murder of his father. He eventually ends up in Iceland where he confronts Fawnir again.
[00:19:41] What's interesting is after watching these two movies back to back is realizing how similar the stories are.
[00:19:48] Starting with The Lion King, The Lion King starts with a spectacular famous opening sequence where all of the animals are singing and dancing while we're awaiting Mufasa's son to be presented to the tribe.
[00:20:03] When you watched The Lion King today, how does it make you feel knowing that it's something that you saw as a kid?
[00:20:09] It's certainly different. We were just talking about on the last podcast how I felt differently seeing Potsu and Castle in the sky when I was a kid versus now as an adult.
[00:20:20] I relate with him a lot less if you can imagine. Seeing Lion King, the emotions are the same because they're sort of brought back up from when you see old movies from your childhood again.
[00:20:31] Although you do see it through an adult lens, it's not as gripping the action scenes aren't as intense. It has that kid-like quality to it.
[00:20:43] But then there are also things which I can notice and appreciate more as an adult such as the voice performances of Scar and Mufasa stuck out immensely this time around.
[00:20:57] I could seriously appreciate both of those performances more as an adult. What did you think about watching this movie again? Well, for starters, I had not seen The Lion King in probably 25 years. Wow!
[00:21:12] And it's worth noting that of course I was alive when it came out and it was a cultural phenomenon when it came out in 1994. I saw it at the theater. In fact, I saw it at the theater in an afternoon showing with an audience full of little kids.
[00:21:30] And I often reflect on that memory because that memory is quite a wonderful one is to be an adult with a bunch of parents sitting there with their kids watching this movie. Now, I didn't yet have you in my life but I did like Disney animated movies.
[00:21:49] Well, that scene you just described is peak Disney magic. I couldn't imagine anything more in the realm of what Disney is trying to capture. It would be a theater mid-90s Lion King. And it was at the absolute zenith of Disney's animated movies popularity.
[00:22:08] Well, it's the golden era. That's what they call it. And I've since learned that the VHS tape release was at the time the most popular VHS movie of all time. When it came out, it sold more copies than any other VHS tape.
[00:22:25] And I believe it because in the immediate aftermath those tapes were everywhere. And we owned one too and I think we still own The Lion King on VHS. I think some of those if you have like an unopened one or like their collectibles now.
[00:22:41] Yeah, I mean if you grew up in the mid to late 90s early 2000s every single home you went to as a kid had that two VHS box set of Titanic and Lion King for sure.
[00:22:54] Well, and that was a culture that was about owning the movies that you loved. And The Lion King was an extremely popular movie when it came out. Now think about 1994. 1994 is the year that Forrest Gump came out. 1994 is the year that Pulp Fiction came out.
[00:23:17] 1994 is the year The Lion King came out. So you've got three very diverse movies there that were huge box office smashes that played for months at the theater to sold out crowds.
[00:23:31] Everywhere. In fact, Lion King my memory tells me it got re-released to the theaters right before it came out on video because that just rack up a few more numbers.
[00:23:42] So a lot of my memory of The Lion King is clouded by those memories of how it impacted the culture at the time. And I was 23, 24 years old when it initially came out.
[00:23:56] And let me say that at the time I collected Disney movies on VHS tape as they came out, not the least of which is because some of them had turned out to be worth quite a bit of money at the time.
[00:24:09] But also because I envisioned today that hey, I may want to have these VHS tapes in case I have a kid. In case I have a kid that wants to sit down and watch these movies because these are Disney classics.
[00:24:19] These are movies that all generations of kids end up watching at one point or another. That was their entire strategy as we talked about in the previous podcast.
[00:24:28] The movies would get re-released every seven to ten years or so just in time for another group of kids to see them for the first time. Yeah, or a group of high school students.
[00:24:39] I mean my when I got most intimate with The Lion King movie was in high school. I was in marching band Go Figure, right? And you know every year for marching band you have a show that you do and it has a theme.
[00:24:54] So I remember one of our themes was like a circus and the other ones were kind of forgettable. But then one of them was The Lion King so we did the whole score to The Lion King and we're marching around on the field like marching bands do.
[00:25:09] Pretty much every one of these songs I can envision what my baritone part was like and playing it. And I loved playing it so I mean you know the shock waves of Lion King resounded right?
[00:25:22] Because not only did I see it as a kid but then here I was in high school again reliving those songs and playing it in marching band. So yeah, I mean that's kind of my relationship. Did you watch The Lion King again in high school? No.
[00:25:35] You just were hearing the songs and remembering what you saw as a kid. Yeah, I just can't wait to make it. I mean I was humming along with them again.
[00:25:45] Before we get into the story, I mean we can just talk about those pretty much every one of those musicals is a classic I think. You know all the songs I think they hold up and what would this be? 30 years later. 30 years later they hold up actually yeah.
[00:26:02] No, they're all memorable to be sure. I'm not a huge Elton John fan but undoubtedly that soundtrack was hugely popular. Those songs got a lot of play. In fact before we started watching it, Lori and I were talking about the songs and she says,
[00:26:18] I'm not sure I remember any of these songs and I sang a few bars and she's like wait a second isn't that Elton John? And I said exactly. So The Lion King is really a multimedia sensation.
[00:26:30] It's not only an animated classic and it's got a lot of famous stars who voice the characters and it has a lot of famous songs and it was a cultural event. So a lot of my perspective on the movie is through that lens.
[00:26:47] So watching it again this week for the first time in many years, it was an interesting endeavor because I found myself thinking, wow, number one, these stories are pretty dark.
[00:27:00] I mean the concepts behind The Lion King if you break it down, the son Simba watches his father violently murdered and then is forced into exile through the humiliation by his uncle. In that exile Simba is separated from his best friend and betrothed Nala.
[00:27:25] He's separated from his mother, he's lost his father, he's lost the entire world that he's grown up in and he's now off on his own trying to figure out who he is and what his life means to him.
[00:27:40] Were those ideas that you understood when you first saw it as a kid? When you're a kid, you just don't understand the implications of everything that's going on. It's hard to understand what it means when a father dies, when you're a young kid.
[00:27:57] It's hard to comprehend the idea of exile. Not only as a kid but in a modern society where exile isn't really a thing anymore. I mean that was the punishment that was supposed to be worse than death back in the day.
[00:28:14] Hey, you don't get to live here anymore. You get to live just not around everything that you hold dear. I mean that used to be the worst punishment way in the long, long ago, right?
[00:28:26] Yeah, one of the hyenas literally says to Simba, don't come back or we'll kill ya. I don't think a lot of those concepts really resonate with a younger audience too much. But nonetheless it's still a gripping intense scene. Like it's action packed.
[00:28:44] Like the hyenas are scary when you're younger. They're scary and you see the dark environments, it's cloudy. And you see that evil green with the hyenas and they did that so well. In reality they're on the Serengeti and everyone's the same color.
[00:29:04] What's interesting is that sequence when Simba and Nala find themselves in the elephant graveyard that really well captures what it is to be a kid too because kids are simultaneously frightened and intrigued by those kinds of scary situations where they're wondering,
[00:29:26] oh this is where all the elephant bones are. How frightening but let's go in and we're intrigued and we want to see what's going on in here and find out what kinds of bones are here and why are all the elephants gathered here.
[00:29:38] It's really kind of an interesting sequence that, you're right, the fear increases once the hyenas make their appearance. Now let me fast forward a little bit into the story. So basically we start with the birth of Simba and we see a couple of musical sequences
[00:29:56] where we watch Simba grow and then he becomes friends with Nala and Zazu is the parrot who works for the king as sort of his assistant slash secretary and Zazu is something of a friend to Simba as well.
[00:30:15] So Simba has like an entire family environment that he is growing up in. He's safe, he's secure maybe a little on the cocky side because when he meets Scar, his uncle played by Jeremy Irons
[00:30:30] who I might add was coming off of an Academy Award from the movie Reversal of Fortune and some of the voice affectations that he takes are based on that character that he had just recently played. He's sort of bragging about how he's going to be king someday
[00:30:49] without any regard for how this might be making his uncle feel and as I was watching that scene after all these years I thought to myself, you know, Scar kind of has a basis for why he would want to take this bratty kid out.
[00:31:06] Do you think that's true? Did you see any of that kind of sense in Simba's development? There's an archetype for the character that Scar plays. This is a character that sees itself come up again and again and has a name, it's just I'm not good with names,
[00:31:22] but the idea of this character is that it can't rely on its strength to solve its problems so it has to get smart or get tricky, become more of a problem solver. Scar even says that, that he can't compete with Mufasa based on strength.
[00:31:39] What's funny is that when you look back at Hamlet or the earlier Amelith, the main characters who Simba is in this movie were the Scar character. That's how they won, they didn't rely on their brute strength.
[00:31:55] But I mean like you said it makes sense the way they put it in the movie to have Scar be that character in this movie. I agree with you it makes sense. What I was also thinking when I saw this as an adult is
[00:32:09] I've never met a king, but you read stories about princes who become kings in history and it's like so-and-so was 14 when they ascended to the throne. A 14 year old being given absolute power? What would that look like?
[00:32:28] I think the movie does a good job at giving you a taste of what a young kid. He's like this all gonna be mine anyways. I'm gonna be king one day. I'm sure that's not too far from what people have actually said all throughout history.
[00:32:41] I couldn't imagine if you told a young me, yeah, you're just gonna have absolute power maybe very soon. How would that cause one to act? Especially to like other adults, like you're just mentioning with Scar.
[00:32:52] Well and that's where I'm saying is Simba comes off as a little arrogant, a little naive, a little entitled when he's talking to his uncle. And it's worth saying too that in relation to what you just said, Scar himself doesn't take revenge on Simba.
[00:33:12] He gets others to do it for him. He has his hyena troupe which features Cheechamaran and Whoopi Goldberg providing voices. Rather humorously I might add. He has the hyenas do the dirty work for him. He has them confront Simba and Nala in the elephant graveyard.
[00:33:34] Immediately after Simba and Nala are saved by Mufasa in the elephant graveyard, Scar is determined that the kids are not gonna get away with next time. So he convinces the hyenas that they're going to cause a stampede of wildebeest
[00:33:58] and he's going to have Mufasa and Simba in the valley at the same time in order to get them both killed so that Scar can then make his ascension to the throne. However, Mufasa turns out to be much more physically strong than anticipated
[00:34:17] and he's able to weather the oncoming rampage of animals long enough to get his son to safety. However, Mufasa doesn't survive. Simba finds him curled up on the ground and approaches him and very sweetly gets underneath his paw in a very powerful emotional scene
[00:34:40] and to take you back to that anecdote of the first time that I saw it, when I was watching this movie the first time in the theater with all these kids, the kids were just practically dancing and singing in the aisles in the first part of the movie.
[00:34:59] They were giggling and laughing and having a great time but during that sequence when all the wildebeest are running through and you can sense that there's real danger that Mufasa and Simba are faced with,
[00:35:10] the audience got much quieter and as the dust settled and Simba approached Mufasa's body, they remember sitting in the theater and hearing this little voice coming from somewhere up front, Mommy, what's wrong with Mufasa? Why isn't he getting up?
[00:35:31] And it was real cute and it really actually nearly brought a tear to my eye back then because these kids didn't realize what they were seeing. They didn't realize the impact of what this really means in their own lives much less in Simba's life.
[00:35:49] It was Claudius that told Hamlet's friends to kill him so in a way Hamlet's friends were the hyenas and the Lion King. Yeah, and in Amloth I mean that's the king, the brother, right Fang? Like he's not the top dog, he's not the top king
[00:36:09] but that top king would actually frown on the guy killing his nephew. That wouldn't be a good look at all. So that's why in Amloth he has two people going on a boat with him to England
[00:36:24] and he writes on a note, well cars it out in old ruin but hey, kill this guy and so he makes the King of Britain do it. So I thought that was interesting how that kind of carried over to Scar. That motif, I can't dirty my hands.
[00:36:38] I'm killing family but not technically killing family because even back then you couldn't do it but you were figuring out ways to skirt around it and even with Mufasa dead, Scar can't bring himself to just kill Simba. He has to skirt around.
[00:36:57] There's still some weird lion code inside of him. Like he can't dirty his hands with it. I found that interesting too. Scar immediately comes up to Simba afterwards and convinces him that it's his fault that Mufasa is dead
[00:37:14] and that the only way that he's going to not be in big trouble for this is if he runs away. Now, that plot development to me somewhat stretched credibility. It seemed a little bit unbelievable that Simba would assume that it was his fault
[00:37:33] for causing the stampede, for causing his dad's death when Simba didn't do anything but follow the direction of his uncle. I think as people grow up, that's kind of indicative of how they deal with things as children. The example that jumps to my mind is
[00:37:50] it's common for kids to blame themselves for their parents getting divorced. So it's not their fault, but the way they were there and they experienced it and they felt it was their fault. It's the same with Simba. The only reason Mufasa died
[00:38:08] was because Simba was out there and stuck. Of course, it was all orchestrated by Scar because he was the one being saved and that's what put his father there. He's always going to associate it. That makes a lot of sense.
[00:38:22] It's literally the sense of this is going to be a moment that defines who Simba grows up to be. With Scar's encouragement, Simba runs off and finds himself alone, starving, thirsty, scared, asleep on the floor of the desert and this is where he meets Timon in Pumbaa.
[00:38:46] Now, Timon in Pumbaa are the meerkat and the wordhog that probably got more airtime in all of the commercials that this movie originally had broadcast on television back in the 90s because they're the light comic relief voiced by Nathan Lane and Ernie Cibella
[00:39:07] who were both huge Broadway performers at the time and they are funny and they're cute and they lead several songs with Simba and it's important to say that a lot of the story is told through song. A lot of the lyrics help define where the characters
[00:39:26] are at their moment and Timon in Pumbaa kind of teach Simba that life's not worth worrying about all that, just put it all out of your mind and just don't worry. Literally no worries is the song Hakuna Matata that they're singing.
[00:39:44] Watching it as an adult this time around has dropped out to me. One, the dynamic between Timon and Pumbaa felt different because as an adult you're like, oh, Pumbaa's definitely smarter. He comes up with all the ideas. Timon's just bossy and confident and steals them
[00:40:02] and Pumbaa's kind of just shy and okay. I think the part that stuck out most to me was at one point they're all looking up at the stars and going, what do you think the stars are? Timon's like, obviously it's something.
[00:40:16] And Pumbaa's like, oh, I just thought they were big flaming balls of gas very far away in space. And he's like, no, it couldn't be that. It's funny they threw that in because those are what stars are. I mean they're not on fire but you get the point.
[00:40:29] But the second thing is Timon and Pumbaa probably had to deal with being exiles themselves it seems because meerkats, warthogs, I mean they are these solo animals I think. They all live with other meerkats or with other warthogs. So they're outcast in some capacity.
[00:40:49] So not only have they bonded together but they've had to cope with that and that cope is Hakuna Matata. For whatever reason they are alone and they're kind of coping with it through this ideology of, oh, nothing really matters and just hey, it's alright. We're here, everything's okay.
[00:41:06] No worries. It really did feel like late teens, early 20s. Just the terms escaping me but where you're just kind of avoiding distracting yourself from your problems and avoiding and they're just, they're gorging themselves and it's kind of like they live in a buffet
[00:41:22] and there are no natural enemies and they're just hanging out saying, I mean seriously, like it does kind of seem like late teens, early 20s where you're just leaving home, you're distracting yourself constantly and you got these problems but you're not dealing with them.
[00:41:35] So watching it this time around it kind of felt like they were in that same kind of place. And Simba isn't really self-conscious of the power that he holds. He's not really thinking about the fact that he is the top of the food chain
[00:41:49] even though Timon makes reference to that at one point. He sees himself as something of an equal with his newfound friends and he eats just like they eat and he kind of subjugates his entire lioness for his friendship with these two guys that he meets along the way.
[00:42:11] While Simba is off in exile with Timon and Pumbaa Scar has introduced the entire population of hyenas to the Pride Lands and they've totally decimated it. All the wildlife have been chased away, all the greenery has been devoured or destroyed and it's a wasteland.
[00:42:33] So it's because Scar has left the Pride Lands and ruined that Nala is out on her own hunt when she comes across Simba for the first time in years and she doesn't even recognize him at first even though he's a dead ringer from Mufasa.
[00:42:52] Yeah, and you know that happens in both of these movies where someone hasn't seen someone in a long time of course lion years are different than human years. Lions live like 15 to 20 years old in a while so obviously it's not the same as the Northmen.
[00:43:07] I always wonder, like is it really like that? Because I've never experienced that. Is it really like where... because I still feel like I've recognized everyone. I remember when I was working at Tamali Kitchen and I was serving burritos and taking orders
[00:43:25] I ran into someone who I had only known from like third grade and I was like 18 at the time. Like I recognized them. It took a second but I don't know. Has that happened with you guys where you just saw someone
[00:43:38] from your past that you completely didn't recognize? I don't think it's just that you don't recognize them but first of all you think that they're dead because they both think that they're dead. Everybody thinks Simba is dead so they're not expecting to see him.
[00:43:54] Right, and further she's completely engulfed in her own existence at that point. Not only is she not expecting to see Simba but she has no reason to think that there's a friend out there that's going to make a difference. She's kind of downtrodden
[00:44:12] and just trying to make it minute to minute because everything that could possibly go wrong in the Pride Lands has gone wrong. So Simba and Nala quickly reunite much to the jealousy of Timon and to a lesser degree Pumbaa but Nala includes both the Meerkat
[00:44:35] and the Warthog in their little group even though at first the reason why she meets them is because she's about to eat the Warthog. But she accepts Simba's friends because she wants Simba to come back and ascend to his throne because he's really the only hope
[00:44:55] that the Pride Lands have. The fact that Scar was a terrible ruler really helped out with that. I feel like there may have been circumstances like this in history where a ruler you serp the throne by mischievous means but it's like what if that ruler does better?
[00:45:14] There's really no impetus to bring back the quote unquote rightful ruler and that's also something I noticed watching this a second time. Things are going much worse and that's why they want Simba back. And as you say, Scar has done a truly terrible job.
[00:45:29] Yeah it's like the economy in presidential elections except in the Serengeti it's just food. Are we running low on food? What's going on? So that's something I also noticed this time around watching it. It really helped Simba's case that Scar was doing a bad job.
[00:45:47] The weirdest part of this movie watching it for me and maybe I missed something was Rafiki just showing up out of nowhere. It really just did feel like oh it's been all these years and then Nala and Rafiki are just showing up and it was meant to be.
[00:46:02] Well I think it's almost because Simba, Timon and Pumbaa have found themselves near the Pride Lands. Simba had gone way off and they had just kind of wandered back. Rafiki is kind of an interesting character. He's voiced by Robert Guillaume who is perhaps most famous to audiences
[00:46:20] as the title character of the television show Bensin which was in itself an offshoot of the TV show Soap. Well for starters Rafiki brings something of a magical element to the story and both of our films today have elements of magic to them. As does Hamlet itself.
[00:46:42] Hamlet famously has the ghost of his father imploring him to avenge his death and Rafiki reveals the image of Mufasa in the sky to Simba who has been looking for Mufasa but hasn't been able to connect to him. Earlier in the film Mufasa explains to Simba
[00:47:07] that the stars are where all of the previous kings survive and look down and provide guidance and that whatever happens to Mufasa he'll always be with Simba. Well until Rafiki reveals Mufasa to Simba Simba hasn't been connected to Mufasa. He's been away in exile
[00:47:29] not just physically but emotionally as well. I don't know if this is just some sort of common wisdom or anything but I've heard this said a couple times where people are like yeah and then I went back to where I grew up to know where I came from
[00:47:44] as if that means something. I feel like a lot of people especially in their late teens early 20s and especially if you've been through something where you got exiled that never happens nowadays or it rarely does. But I think people in general
[00:48:00] it's just kind of like a phase of life where you start to grow up you start to do things and then maybe it's like what am I doing? I feel like there was some original game plan or some original dream or hope
[00:48:12] and whatever I've done in my adult life thus far it kind of doesn't seem like it's in that sort of direction. That phrase sort of popped into my head when I was watching this. What is the purpose? Why do people say go back and visit
[00:48:26] where you grew up to see where you came from? What does that mean? You go back to remember what the original plan was when you were a kid what feelings did you have? Who did you think you were going to be? What does that mean?
[00:48:40] How does that relate to you now? What does that mean? Seeing Nala and Rafiki and him being a lion. It gives you connection too. Yeah, that connection to his past is like oh I am a royal lion. Time to do royal lion things.
[00:48:56] That's kind of the point that Rafiki is trying to teach to Simba is to learn from the past is to learn from the mistakes that he's made and take that that Rafiki method where he hits him with a stick and goes
[00:49:10] well it's in the past but you can still feel it. What are you just going to forget about it? I've trained a lot of people where I've mentored some people for a split second I'm like can I get away with doing that? Very short and effective.
[00:49:24] You just want to hit him with a stick. Don't hit him with a stick. So Simba returns to the Pride Lands and confronts Scar and Simba doesn't yet realize that Scar is responsible for the death of his father but Scar acknowledges that and Simba is enraged
[00:49:44] and then this creates a similar situation between Scar and Simba as Scar when he had murdered Mufasa. At which point so Scar has him pinned down off the edge of a cliff the lightning bolt hits the grass so he's kind of dangling over fire a scene reminiscent of
[00:50:04] when Scar had Mufasa in his hand and threw him off. Although this time Simba jumps to his feet him hearing that it was actually Scar that murdered his father enraged him to the point where he could seemingly defy gravity jump up accuse Scar of murdering his father
[00:50:26] and then Scar admits it. What's interesting is Simba isn't intending to kill Scar though. Even in that moment of rage, even in that moment of vengeance Simba is willing to release Scar but Scar isn't willing to let it settle on just those terms and he tries
[00:50:46] to attack Simba when he's not looking and then this recreates the moment between Simba and Scar that Scar had with Mufasa and Simba ends up crossing Scar to his death and takes his rightful place from the throne and everybody starts singing the song and that brings us
[00:51:06] to the end of the movie. I was impressed about how fast that movie went for me. I mean it felt like 20 minutes long now usually I say that I say that and oh it must have been so good I lost all track of time
[00:51:20] and I'd say that's partially true but it seemed a little lacking in content for a depth from where I remember seeing it last. I don't know did you guys feel like that? I had a lot of warm feelings towards The Lion King and I still do
[00:51:36] I still regard my memories of 1994 sitting in that theater as a wonderful remembrance of a time gone past but those Disney movies as I've gotten older they feel very childlike and I guess that's kind of the point but I even felt that way when I was a kid
[00:51:58] when I was seeing movies like The Jungle Book or The Rescuers or Cinderella and I think I saw 101 Dalmatians at the theater as a kid as well I totally forgot about that once you brought it up by the way. But those movies even when I was a kid
[00:52:14] felt like kid movies I enjoyed them but they weren't movies that I thought about as oh that's my favorite movie it's like what I was telling you before we started recording is I much preferred The Warner Brothers cartoons to the Disney cartoons. Disney had a Sunday evening
[00:52:32] program where they would show the Donald Duck cartoons or the Mickey Mouse cartoons and I didn't really like any of those cartoons I thought they were very goofy, literally goofy with the dog they were childlike in a way that didn't appeal to me whereas The Warner Brothers
[00:52:48] cartoons with Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck those were all just trying to be funny and those were much funnier and enjoyable to me as a result so watching The Lion King today I did enjoy it I do think it's a fine film and it's certainly one of the
[00:53:04] very best Disney classically animated films ever made I mean it is a classic but I don't know that I love it personally I think I agree with that because it's clearly pre-pixar so it looks like one big cartoon one very long Saturday morning cartoon What's ironic is that
[00:53:28] even though Lion King affects the traditional animation by 1994 it was largely animated by computers so even though Toy Story would come out just one year later they look very different even though they were very similarly produced. I would need
[00:53:46] some time to sit down and like write this out but there is to me some kind of palpable difference between the type of kid movie when you're talking about a toy story in Lion King each respectively like top tier cartoon versus 3D animated movies
[00:54:06] but there is some kind of palpable difference there where I think Toy Story falls on the camp of made for all audiences on another visit of Lion King it doesn't really feel like it's made for all audiences and that's not because of the themes
[00:54:22] like you said the theme of watching your father die you know and poking his dead body in the beginning that's an area adult like theme but it's more just the pacing and the depth it doesn't feel like one where it's seriously made for all audiences
[00:54:42] it's kind of made for a kid with a short attention span but still wanting to tell powerful story to that kid I do like how Disney never shied away from death right there's a lot of themes like Bambi Dumbo, Tarzan you know all of they didn't shy away
[00:55:02] from that and that's a very heavy thing for a child and there's a couple really dark places in the Lion King this is the GMR so for the younger people listening to our podcast before you had the internet you would watch a movie by putting in a disc
[00:55:18] called it a DVD and then that would play the movie they would have a menu and everything so my parents had hundreds and hundreds of DVDs that we'd watch so I always had a wide library of films to choose from you would download it
[00:55:36] and then go do something else and then you'd come back later and say hey it's already downloaded and once it downloaded you could play it multiple times it's just that it took so long you bet I'm playing it multiple times it took two hours to download
[00:55:50] The Generations Movie Review Podcast our next movie the Northman directed by Robert Eggers who also directed a wonderful movie called The Witch a few years earlier takes a very similar story but tells it in a much more adult fashion The Northman features
[00:56:10] a story based on the legend of Amlith which in turn is a very similar story and arguably influential on Shakespeare's Hamlet Amlith is a Viking prince who at a young age sees his father murdered by his own uncle and disappears into his own sort of exile much like
[00:56:34] Simba did except Amlith uses that time to learn how to become the warrior that he's going to need to be to avenge his father's death with his uncle we're thrown right into dark ages Europe where the Vikings have started to plunder this takes place in Denmark right so
[00:56:56] Amlith's dad is not the top king he's kind of a minor king he has his own kingdom yes and you see Amlith's dad coming back home from a raid and he's victorious though he's been seriously injured as well he's lamenting to his wife that
[00:57:16] Amlith is a little soft but we need to get him on the ruler track now because I don't know how much longer I have to live and remember if he's dying he wants to die in battle to get to Valhalla critically in its dark ages Viking times
[00:57:36] that's something to consider I'm dying from a cut and times are peaceful I need to get to battle so anyways he's kind of inducting his son Amlith via some ritual you're thrown right into the times of the movie and I think it's so cool trying to explore
[00:57:56] what those old religions spiritual practices would have been like and I love the way they portray it how realistic are you know there's always a touch of fantasy when you're back in those times I love how throughout this whole movie they just have these touches of supernatural forces
[00:58:14] it's all just out of reach they're not coming out and telling you it's real there's some hallucination when they're with some kind of Viking shaman but then the hallucination it seems unreal and the visuals are unreal but then it pans down and they're all still sitting down
[00:58:32] so it's almost like we're taken through the spiritual journey that they just went on as they leave this spiritual practice that's when Amlith's dad is murdered by Fjolnir not even a duel, it's just by arrows he's just ambushed in shop with arrows and then his brother beheads him
[00:58:52] all while Amlith is looking at him from behind a tree and it's worth saying Fjolnir then takes Amlith's mother and presumably is intending to rape and pillage and carries her away and Amlith escapes though his uncle wants him killed and in fact he sends his own people after
[00:59:16] Amlith to kill him I want that boy dead bring me his head and I'm going to be the first one to be killed because Amlith cuts off one of their noses and runs away because he has to explain why his nose is gone the only enemy is this
[00:59:34] 10 year old boy and your nose is gone, what happened well my nose is gone but instead of telling the truth he's like no I killed him I got Amlith so they stop looking and it's the first major thing or I guess in the Fjolnir he
[00:59:54] stops, he doesn't kill the son right because that would be frowned upon and the whole story is Amlith sort of pretending to be shocked and traumatized and kind of dumb not that smart sort of pretending to be that way pretending to be incompetent
[01:00:12] so that no one expects that he'll want revenge right and that's the arc the story takes so Amlith is actually living around Fjolnir and devising a way to take back the throne and take revenge via that way and this movie from the beginning it takes a different path
[01:00:28] where as opposed to the scar like character that's portrayed by Amlith in the original story in this rendition of Amlith he's much more of a Simba yeah he's much more of a Simba right, a serious warrior we cut right to him being a serious warrior and it's interesting
[01:00:48] the only criticism about this movie that stuck with me when it came out was the discrepancy in ages right because Alexander Skarsgard when they filmed this was like mid to late 30s maybe early 40s, fairly old right, you know he went from a kid
[01:01:02] to being like a 40 year old man that doesn't make much sense but I think he's supposed to be like early to mid 20s which I mean that's a little unbelievable when you have this super ripped 35 year old man supposedly playing a 20 to 25 year old
[01:01:18] but you know next scene is he's with some kind of Viking billaging party I'm sure there's an appropriate word for that well they're berserkers and this is something that I didn't pick up the first time we saw this movie but watching it for the audience listening at home
[01:01:34] I'd like to say I now watch all home movies with the subtitles on so that I can make sure I understand the dialogue as it's being said and one of the things that I missed in the theater when we saw this film the first time is that
[01:01:48] Amloth becomes a berserker and a berserker is somebody who is like possessed with fighting skills there a berserker is somebody in the old Norse is somebody who fights in like a trance like state so in a way it kind of relates to the way Hamlet also is faced
[01:02:16] with his father being a ghost with the magic of the Lion King the berserkers are also something of a possessed force of fighters what I wasn't clear on was whether they were slaves if he had been enslaved or if he had just joined this group because
[01:02:34] the first scene we see of Amloth as an adult is he's part of the rowing crew they're just rowing along finding the next village that they're going to destroy and pillage I don't think he was a slave he was taken in but I think probably relatively
[01:02:50] low on the social ladder I don't think his royal status transferred but he's certainly not a slave okay yeah and like I said that was unclear but once they get to the village that we first see him in they immediately start destroying and killing
[01:03:08] one of the most unsettling scenes is when they take all the women and children of the community and lock them into a house with a hay roof and then set that roof on fire it's notably all the ones they can't sell yeah so all the
[01:03:24] feeble ones all the ones that they can't sell as slaves they burn another similarity to Amloth in the original Amloth written by Saxo Grammaticus which by the way his name is Saxo and the Grammaticus the Latin it just means someone who writes Saxo who writes it's funny because
[01:03:44] Amloth again not because he's a brute warrior but in Grammaticus is telling he tricks a bunch of fjellinjors men into a tent and then sets it on fire so I do like they're these similar kind of themes that scene is very cool I think
[01:04:02] it's what a lot of people think battles were like back then and what's cool is maybe they were in a sense it's really hard to tell because no one was there and the cool thing about ancient battles is that everyone just took how they happened for granted
[01:04:18] so we don't have a lot of details about what that was like like what the actual invasion of the berserkers on the town would have been like because in this movie it's depicted that whomever the Vikings there were raiding were not the type of warrior
[01:04:32] people that the Vikings were that the Scandinavian people were and certainly that was a big theme throughout history is that people like the Scandinavians or the Mongolian these were people that were just naturally way better fighters than the quote on quote more civilized people
[01:04:50] and I do like how and this is a small note but at some point I think after they're done raiding the village the Vikings are referring to the more civilized people that they raided as savages I thoroughly enjoyed that I mean that's what they thought
[01:05:06] they thought they were more pure and they were more war like I enjoyed that detail I mean it's unclear how those battles actually happened what was cool about it is it just kind of felt like a video game and I know you guys haven't played a lot
[01:05:18] of video games but it was shot like you were kind of there controlling Alexander Skarsgard oh this guy's coming at you jump down and chop him with an axe I love how it was filmed and it felt like you were right there with him and
[01:05:32] it was visceral with the sounds and how it was filmed and yeah I just love that and that continues throughout the rest of the movie you noticed that too right Jim I was going to say you know I suppose that's a generational difference because I'm not
[01:05:44] sure that I would see that particular detail as an advantage of the storytelling it was shot all in one long sequence but I wasn't equating that to a video game I was equating that to the choreography of the scene which was very impressive but that
[01:06:04] said it was brutal and when I think about violence of the middle ages I can't help but assume that it's brutal because there's no medicine like we have today there's no doctors or hospitals it's you get cut everything immediately becomes grossly infected and you die so after Amlith
[01:06:32] and his group of vikings terrorized this particular village he comes across something of an oracle who reminds him of the oath that he took to his father and that's an important sequence that happened before the death of his father is that his father and him are
[01:06:48] barking like dogs and eating food from bowls and his father implores Amlith to take vengeance on him because his father knows I'm gonna die in battle so what I want from you Amlith is when I go I want you to avenge my death so
[01:07:10] for the early years of Amlith's adult life he has not been focused on this but this oracle incidentally played by the musician Bjork implores him to find and take that vengeance on his uncle so when Uncle Fiona ascended to King Arvindul's place in the kingdom shortly thereafter
[01:07:32] another king took over and left Fiona as the brother less is how he becomes known and he's living on a farm with Amlith's mom and they have their own family and Amlith brands himself as a slave and then takes passage to Fiona's farm in Iceland
[01:07:56] again this isn't what happened in Amlith the original story but I think they make this change to bring it to Iceland because they really want to play out the conflict between Fiona and Amlith so the thing is in the original one
[01:08:14] they didn't do that because there was the High King hanging out who didn't allow this kind of thing it's also important to note that in the Dark Ages and the Viking era when all this stuff was happening there's something called blood gold so
[01:08:32] I know it's kind of funny and researching this we were shockingly more advanced and it was like modern humans just in a different time because essentially there was a problem with revenge so as you noted Amlith's dad was like when I die take revenge on me
[01:08:48] the big problem back then was that you had these vikings from all these different areas who just kept taking revenge my dad this son this son my dad so long so they came up with this idea where hey if you just pay them gold
[01:09:00] then they can't take revenge if they take the gold you cannot take revenge so I think it was kind of smart because if you still kept it in the kingdom there were these king forces there was the blood gold kind of stuff going on
[01:09:14] it was like in a sense more civilized than Iceland so I really liked the idea that they brought it out there so that there could be this serious story of like visceral violent revenge we're also introduced to you on the boat Olga of the birch forest
[01:09:30] who is some kind of a wickend yeah she's just some kind of a wickend but they meet on the boat because she was part of that village that they just raided so they were selling the slaves and this boat of slaves he's told is being taken to Iceland
[01:09:46] that's why he gets on the boat they finally get to Iceland and we see an older fjolnir slightly more humbled fjolnir as well yeah he has his own very small fiefdom there with the kölkindmin or queen goodrn another slight similarity we were discussing
[01:10:06] or the podcast but in hamlet it's Gertrude little similarity there we'll get to this but the thing that's immediately noticeable is she doesn't seem like a prisoner the former queen his mother doesn't seem like a prisoner here she's had multiple kids with fjolnir
[01:10:26] and the time that has passed and they sort of carved out this little fiefdom well they've had one kid because fjolnir had his own son and then with Gundon they had their son Gunnar together and once they get there hamlet kind of integrates himself into the local culture
[01:10:48] as it were he meets another oracle type I'm not quite sure what he is but he basically creates a seance between hamlet and the skull of haimyr and he's king arvindal's jester and that's how played by William Defoe and they have a seance where haimyr speaks to hamlet
[01:11:16] and advises him that there's a sword that he needs to obtain and that sword can only be drawn at the gates of hell so hamlet obtains this blade and then hides it at the farm and then they end up competing in something of a rugby like game
[01:11:36] I'm not going to say the original name but the translation is just like ball game but I mean it's sub-scandinavian which I can't say you take the ball everyone has the wooden stick and you hit the ball with the stick
[01:11:50] and if it hits opponents pole then you get a point the real point of it seems to be they each kick each other's ass and try to take the ball from one another and then they get the ball from rugby so while they're doing this hamlet saves
[01:12:04] fjolnir's son gunner who is not incidentally hamlet's half-brother yeah and before we keep going on I would just like to point out that this is in the original story of hamlet where they're talking about the sheath sword so it works out differently because remember
[01:12:22] hamlet in the original one is kind of more like pretending to be a dunce to plot his way to take revenge so he fakes his own death and to sort of mock him they bury him with a sword that can't be unsheathed well hamlet is actually still alive
[01:12:40] so he takes that sword and swaps it out with fang's sword so that when they do have the final duel number one and this is what's funny again they can call it a duel because fjolnir tried to use his sword but he couldn't pull it out
[01:12:56] so it's funny they took that thing which in the original story was supposed to be like oh another one of hamlet's tricks he slew fang and then that's how he got his revenge I like how they took that and they still used
[01:13:08] it in this movie it was more appropriate for the character of hamlet in the story of the north men where he's a huge warrior fighter here's the most powerful blade but you can only use it at this volcano
[01:13:20] so again that's something where I really like how they did it not to mention we didn't bring this up but when he gets the sword he has to go on another amazing cool video game like quest where he takes a rope down into like what looks
[01:13:34] like an old ship and is met with an old skeleton king and he fights the king and it's this gripping battle where the skeleton king or the ship melts in the moonlight yeah he's like a zombie or some kind of supernatural character
[01:13:48] but he was like a boss fight like because he was moving slow and then all of a sudden super quick with his movements a very gripping scene and then the camera pans over just like it did in that ritual scene in the beginning
[01:14:02] and oh wait none of that actually happened it was all on his head it was another encounter he had to make in the spiritual realm I just thought that scene where he had to get that sword was fairly fascinating and it makes sense too as a plot device
[01:14:18] and this shows up and he's the strongest guy there why doesn't he just kill feel near right away well it's this plot device that keeps that from happening because it's his destiny to fight this man and get his revenge on a volcano because and let's know this
[01:14:36] the entire time whatever he does it's going to end up with him fighting fill near at a volcano so it makes it make more sense from that direction and then another thing like I say that it's not a small complication that amlith is there with
[01:14:54] his mother and his half brother gunner who he saves during this ball game is endearing to amlith and he looks up to amlith based on the work that amlith has done at the sheep farm because amlith is slowly working his way up the ladder of respect
[01:15:12] amongst the other slaves and finally he's earning their trust and this is all very intentional like you say because amlith knows that it's ultimately his destiny to fight feel near at the base of this volcano which I referred to earlier as the gates
[01:15:30] of hell but that's with one L because hell is the volcano so he needs to create the scenario where this happens and the way that he does that is by engendering their trust so once he saves gunner feel near as older son rewards him pick a woman
[01:15:48] and will give you some additional duties so that you don't have to do all the grunt work so naturally amlith chooses Olga and they make love and they make plans and it's at that point that amlith entails what he intends to do what he's there to do
[01:16:06] and Olga is all for she wants to be amlith going forward and she wants to see him complete his destiny it's a very you know wiccan witch kind of thing to do kind of guiding him along helping him out along the way she does help him
[01:16:26] thorir the son that wasn't with queen gudrin so not the half brother thorir had some friends that he was really close to so amliths first act of terror is to like impale them kill them and dismember them make them into like a horse with their limbs that was
[01:16:46] incredibly gnarly in fact it's so gnarly that they think it must be something supernatural that's doing this calling back to the first scene in the movie after this we see amlith howling to get the local dogs to attack their owners pretty much the main wiccan of
[01:17:02] feel near as camp decides to sacrifice someone to appease this angry spirit and while the dogs are attacking their owners amlith saves that one and sacrifices one from feel near as camp it's during this time that he's able to get into the house and confront his mother
[01:17:24] you know i said we were going to talk about this later and that's why i mean to me this is the climax of the movie i agree it's the most powerful scene it's the most powerful scene because this is when reality hits
[01:17:38] in the lion king we spoke about how simba is off with tamon and pumba he's not facing what happened he's kind of distracting himself he's pushing it off to the corner you know what we learn in this scene is that these ideas that he propagated
[01:17:58] in his head about revenge for his whole life that have kept them going that have kept them from facing the reality of the situation and moving on he was holding on to these ideas of his mom was trapped and needed to save his mom
[01:18:12] well he's confronted and we're confronted with the fact that no that wasn't the case queen gudger wanted to go was feel near in fact she was the one that gave him the idea because we learned that she was taken in a raid as a sort of conquest trophy
[01:18:30] and she didn't even want to have amloth to begin with to me this is where it's oh nothing can be the same because before amloth was a living in this own revenge narrative and reality that he built for himself that has allowed him to keep
[01:18:46] going and see his world shattering where it's like not to mention when the mother says they don't love you that much or care about you that also just hurts too well because he believes everything he's done to this point is just he believes that it's his
[01:19:04] destiny and to hear his mother telling him the reality of the situation is to undo that self-belief and to render his life wasted because what's the purpose of killing his uncle at this point if his mother is happy because earlier in the movie we see him chanting it
[01:19:28] kill my uncle save my mother avenge my father kill my uncle, save my mother he's stuck in the past he hasn't moved on and you're right when you realize that amloth is too far gone in this revenge story he's plotted out his life this way and even
[01:19:50] if his mother is telling him the truth of things he's not going to believe the reality is completely different he's not going to listen to it and furthermore she now can't have him around and he didn't believe her he didn't believe her when she was saying it
[01:20:08] he didn't believe her when he left he still didn't believe her for a while in the story he ends up killing fielner's older son and he steals his heart literally physically cuts out his heart and steals his heart and at this point there's no going back
[01:20:24] now amloth has revealed himself to fielner and the rest of the family and the rest of the people living at the sheep farm so at this point amloth is preparing himself for the ultimate confrontation so his mother reveals to fielner who amloth is and they decide to
[01:20:46] kill olga but amloth ultimately offers to trade his son's heart for olga's life amloth is captured by fielner and his people yeah remember he's using that sword that cannot be in a sheep's yet so he's at some kind of disadvantage and he's watching olga run away
[01:21:08] at which point he's caught off-guard and they get him yeah and so they end up torturing him and throughout the movie amloth sees visions of ravens who are representative of his father his father is literally the war raven as it were
[01:21:30] so whenever he sees these visions of ravens he's reminded of what his purpose is here he's reminded of what he is here to do his act of vengeance against his uncle yeah so he's taken prisoner he's hanging upside down and the ravens chop him down right and
[01:21:48] that's when the amloth and olga escape and they're on the boat and olga is now starting to think to herself you know maybe vengeance isn't a really good idea maybe it's better if we just escape and go off and start a family yeah it's all in the past
[01:22:04] we're never gonna return yeah and it didn't work out the way you thought it was going to anyways amloth so why don't we just leave it and just escape you took your son and you take your dad and kill the son and we can leave
[01:22:16] well as we see that's not gonna work for amloth he can't be saved he's already too far bought into this idea of revenge and that that's his destiny he says to olga it was foretold that I had to choose between being happy with those I love
[01:22:38] or fighting those with whom I hate and he says I choose to do both and he thinks he's doing both because he loved olga and got her pregnant and then he jumps off the boat and he's gonna go get his revenge now
[01:22:50] I had a sense that he thought he was gonna return too and maybe I was reading more into that than was actually there but when he jumped off that boat and swam to shore in my own mind even though I'd seen this movie before I was thinking hey
[01:23:04] you know what he still got a shot at a happy ending here all he has to do is go kill his uncle and then run back and go meet his wife to be and they can have that family after all but alas that's not how it works out
[01:23:18] amloth gets there and single handedly kills all of fjolnir's people which is quite an impressive feat though entirely believable because it's worth pointing out for those of you at home that haven't ever seen alexander scarzgaard before this guy's like nearly 7 feet tall not 1 ounce of fat on him
[01:23:40] he's quite an impressive figure and he tears through everybody that is with fjolnir at the foot of the volcano there are literal accounts of single vikings taking out 50 people it's that berserker thing yeah it's the berserker thing I mean it's just
[01:24:00] a warrior people versus not a warrior people and their technology difference is minimal that tends to happen there is a story of one viking raid in england where there was like a bridge and there was one person wide and one viking was at the bridge
[01:24:16] and just took out like 70 people this kind of stuff it's on the realm of believability for sure one of the negative effects for amloth is while he's searching for fjolnir his mom and his half brother attack him and when we were watching this scene
[01:24:34] in the area and I both marveled at the multiple wounds that amloth endures during the sequence when his mom attacks him and when his half brother attacks him when gunner jumps on amloth back he must stab him 10 times before amloth is even able to respond and tragically kills
[01:24:56] his half brother at this point he realizes there's nobody left which just up to him and fjolnir and now they're going to meet their destiny at the foot of the volcano and then he unsheaths that sword and they have quite a battle between each other very very cool
[01:25:16] I haven't seen anything like it in all of cinema it felt like a jedi battle but way less corny way more dirty way more realistic but at the same time having the qualities of magic it's like you knew this moment was coming for the preceding two hours
[01:25:36] of the movie yet it still swipes you off your feet watching this the first time at the theaters I didn't know it was going to be this cool you knew it was coming as alluded to in the gates of hell it's one of the coolest scenes ever
[01:25:52] and once it comes to the end the ending makes complete sense of course it was going to end this way there was no getting around his ultimate fate in contrast to how amlith actually ends where he does get his revenge this is not the case in the amlith
[01:26:08] in the northman but I do like the message that's given he built his entire identity as a person off of revenge so he couldn't allow himself to live in a world where he wasn't reaching for that revenge that's the power of forgiveness at the end of the day
[01:26:28] is that you can base your identity on something because I feel like revenge is one of those things where if it simmers for a while it can become kind of all consuming you're just focusing on the past and the past and the past and you can't live
[01:26:42] and it becomes your identity and it's all you are and who you stand for and we see that happen with amlith he's given it out he got some modicum of revenge but he still can't do it and he can't live everything he wouldn't have one
[01:26:58] he's too invested in the idea of being a vengeful man this is not unlike the lesson that Rafiki is teaching Simba you gotta learn to let go of the past learn from the past and move on exactly and it makes you think like what if Rafiki met amlith
[01:27:14] in this movie and did gave him the whole stick lesson maybe that's what amlith needed towards the beginning and we wouldn't have had any of this craziness.
[01:27:26] Maybe Olga of the Birch Forest should have given him the old stick lesson before he jumped off that boat and swam back to Iceland, you know? Not that Fiore or Amlith are very redeemable characters, but in the last scene when they're fighting, who are you rooting for?
[01:27:44] Yeah, yeah. I'm definitely rooting for Gunnar. No, I mean well because you know that the wounds he's already taken is probably gonna bleed out. Yeah, well his mom stabs him like in the gut right? So she immediately-
[01:28:00] Well yeah it's like one of those big swipes across his body and then Gunnar stabs him and then you know he still gets cut up while fighting Fjolnir. He's mortally wounded when he faces off. And that's what's cool about the ending. The ending's already written in stone.
[01:28:16] He's dying here, he's going to Valhalla and we know that as an audience. Those wounds aren't gonna be healed by some volcano magic. He's dying and we already know that yet we're still watching just to see this revenge story play out.
[01:28:31] Just to see for the pure spectacle, for the pure battle, these two men we already know they're dying here but we're still watching them fight. And that's kind of what makes it cool.
[01:28:41] No one's gonna win this fight. It's just a fight and they both lose and we know that going into it so I think that kind of sets it apart. So how did these two films compare and contrast?
[01:28:54] The Northman got better from when I watched it the first time. I enjoyed it more, it made more sense. The second time around I picked up on more details.
[01:29:05] As he mentioned earlier it's very plot dense. And in fact if you do study history there are a lot of correlations and motifs that are very similar to other things as I pointed out throughout this podcast.
[01:29:17] In my estimation I'll be watching that movie for a while but that can't be said for The Lion King. Now on our last podcast we were talking about Castle in the Sky which is a movie I loved as a kid.
[01:29:28] I'll still watch that from time to time but Lion King watching that movie this time around that's certainly a movie I won't tend to watch going forward. Unless you're watching it with your grandchildren or something that really is the purpose of a movie like The Lion King.
[01:29:44] Look at God, he's scary huh? 80 year old Kyle. Look at the hiatus. As you watch a movie like The Lion King you realize that the intended audience is children and that's whom it is best watched with.
[01:30:00] My overriding memory of The Lion King is watching it in a theater full of children and that's the memory that I probably will hang on to taking it forward. That's peak Lion King experience right there.
[01:30:14] And the Northmen as you noted we saw that in the theater together and I enjoyed it very much the first time I saw it. I also enjoyed it more watching at the second time.
[01:30:25] I understood what I was watching much better the second time even though honestly talking through the plot here today has helped me realize how much I still missed.
[01:30:37] And I was following the subtitles and following along watching it very intently there's still much that didn't quite register with me as we were watching it.
[01:30:47] Yeah part of my idea by having a podcast with The Lion King and Hamlet was just to kind of open that world because it is one of the oldest stories.
[01:31:00] One of the most famous stories at the very least is this idea of Amloth and kind of Hamlin and this revenge royal revenge. So after seeing both of these movies what do you think about Hamlet going back to think about it?
[01:31:16] Did it kind of open your perspective a little more? Like what do you think about that general story because I mean that's the thing they're kind of the same story. They're like roughly the same story.
[01:31:28] What do you think about that rough story that base story as a story after watching these movies? I mean in the end this is as basic of a story as you can pause. I mean think back to our Star Trek 2 The Wrath of Khan discussion.
[01:31:44] I mean the desire for vengeance is a very powerful one. When you feel like you've been wronged and you need to make it right that can compel your entire life. And history has shown that it has for a great number of people throughout time and throughout history.
[01:32:06] So I can't help but think that this was a very entertaining story. It's a very entertaining story and in fact it makes me want to go back and watch Hamlet. It makes me want to see some of the legendary productions of Hamlet. One final note related to Hamlet.
[01:32:23] One of the most famous performers to ever perform Hamlet in America was an actor named Edwin Booth. Edwin Booth was an actor prior to the onset of film.
[01:32:38] But critics at the time raved about the brilliance of his Hamlet and maybe is the most famous American to ever play that role. But unfortunately for Edwin Booth, history remembers him for an entirely different reason. That's what I was going to say.
[01:32:53] His brother was John Wilkes Booth who assassinated Abraham Lincoln. Were you going to say something? I wasn't but revenge bad. To quote Marcus Aurelius, the best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury. Thank you for listening to the GMR.
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