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The 13th Warrior
*1/2
Cinema
Releases - September 3, 1999
Rated on a 4-star
scale. USA. Directed by John McTiernan. Written by Warren Lewis and William
Wisher; from the novel "Eaters of the Dead" by Michael Critchon. Starring
Antonio Banderas, Dennis Storhoi, Vladimir Kulich, Omar Sharif, Diane Venora,
Anders T. Andersen, Richard Bremmer, Tony Curran.
One of the great obstacles on the road to junk-food
refreshment is having a soft drink explode all over you as you open the can.
The event can be avoided, in my experience, by tapping the end of the can
with a hard object -- it's something to do with dispersing the fizzy particles,
which would otherwise be stuck in one place, waiting to erupt.
Therefore, near the beginning of "The 13th
Warrior", I reached for my expensive Oakley sunglasses, to tap my
Diet Coke can with them. As I did so, they fell off the seat, and I was unable
to find them by simply reaching to the floor and moving my hand
around.
The screening was a disaster from start to finish.
When I decided to forget about the sunglasses until I was leaving, I was
nonetheless disturbed by the film's terrible presentation. The anamorphic
frame was projected without correction -- in other words, things were stretched
out, making them tall and thin, and cutting off most of the top and bottom
of the picture.
Thankfully -- because the photography in "The
13th Warrior" is wonderful -- the incompetent projection was corrected before
the 15-minute mark. This left the film with no more excuses for being annoying
and dull. Antonio Banderas stars as Arab courtier poet Ahmed Ibn Fahdlan,
banished from his palace for making sheep's eyes at a royal mistress... or
something. He and his guide Melchisidek (Omar Sharif) somehow manage to walk
from Arabia to Viking country, where they are given shelter by Norsemen beginning
a war. A soothsayer declares that twelve of the Norsemen should fight, as
well as some stranger. Banderas -- although he's a poet -- becomes the thirteenth
warrior!
Things get even more ludicrous. On the way to
battle, Banderas manages to learn his new companions' language in the course
of the evening meal, simply by paying careful attention to their lips. In
battle, the men think their enemy is a race of flesh-eating bears... but
they turn out to be a tribe of humans dressed up as flesh-eating
bears!
Except for the aforementioned, nothing much actually
happens in "The 13th Warrior". There isn't a standard structure, in which
a story arc and its dramatic situations must be resolved -- just long scenes
of discussion about how battle will soon commence, then long scenes of gore
as it does. There are, however, an abundance of grave, cryptic lines and
solemn camera movements, performed with grim earnestness to prevent us from
enjoying them on a tongue-in-cheek level. Back in the 70s and 80s, Hollywood
would have known that Arab curses, Viking soldiers and cannibalistic
fancy-dressers make for silly entertainment -- "The 13th Warrior" seems to
think it's a great swashbuckling epic on the level of
"Braveheart".
The credited director is John McTiernan, although
rumours persist that producer Michael Crichton took over to re-shoot some
key scenes. Both men have done first-rate work in the past -- McTiernan made
"Die Hard", Crichton is the creator of "Westworld" and "Jurassic Park" --
but lately they seem to be slipping. "The Lost World", the follow-up to "Jurassic
Park", was completely uninspired, and McTiernan's recent remake of "The Thomas
Crown Affair" is one of the year's worst films. Whichever of them had control
of "The 13th Warrior" had no idea what they were doing -- its scenes don't
even develop in logical stages. One minute, the platoon are riding on horseback,
then suddenly we cut to them on a ship. Later, a castle appears out of nowhere,
and its interiors alternate between light and dark whenever McTiernan and
Crichton feel this would be nice.
In one particularly boring stretch of the film,
I made up my mind to dive under the seat and have a serious look for those
sunglasses. I found them rather quickly, which was something of a relief,
but it also left me with nothing to do, except sit out the rest of the dreary
movie, in an atmosphere that felt like a hospital waiting room. It's possible
to sense when the people around you are bored, depressed and wishing they
could stop wasting time. "The 13th Warrior" provokes this sensation. At least
the Diet Coke tasted good.
COPYRIGHT© 1999 Ian
Waldron-Mantgani
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