In short: Troll (2022)

A publicly not exactly lauded attempt to build a tunnel through the Dovrefjell mountain range in Norway awakens a kaiju-sized troll. The thing turns out to be rather unhappy with certain elements of Norway’s secret history and goes on a bit of a rampage that will eventually lead it to Oslo.

The authorities are not especially effective fighting a giant menace that seems immune to modern weapons. Only palaeontologist Nora Tidemann (Ine Marie Wilmann), who grew up with a father (Gard B. Eidsvold) obsessed with the hidden truth of troll lore, is willing to think outside of the box. She acquires her own mini-coterie of nerds – her father, assistant to the prime minister Andreas Isaksen (Kim Falck), Isaksen’s techie friend Sigrid (Karoline Viktoria Sletteng Garvang, owner of what I imagine to be a very exhausting name even for Norwegian names), and special forces captain Kristoffer Holm (Mads Sjøgård Pettersen) – and just might be her country’s only chance against the troll and the experimental weaponry of the mad minister of defence (Fridtjov Såheim).

I actually love parts of the world building of Roar Uthaug’s Troll, the way it creates a space where the international language of kaiju movie tropes can be read through the lens of the Norwegian local, folklore and cultural specificities.

Unfortunately, once it leaves the conceptual level, Troll’s script (by Espen Aukan) fails on nearly every conceivable level and plays out like a particularly lazily written pre-Sharknado SyFy Original with a bit of a budget but little idea of what to do with it.

Characters aren’t just one-dimensional tropes, something I’d be totally fine in a giant monster movie, but the blandest version of them, spouting ill-timed one-liners and tumbling awkwardly into emotional beats the script doesn’t put even the tiniest amount of work into preparing. The plot doesn’t actually feel like any such thing but a string of beats cribbed from other giant monster movies strung together with little thought about how they actually hang together. The writing lets Jun Fukuda era Toho kaijus look like Shakespeare, or really, like films crafted by actual professionals with a bit of self-regard. There’s nothing wrong with underwriting the humans in a monster movie; there’s a lot wrong with underwriting them so badly they get in the way of a viewer having fun with the monsters.

Andin the way the shoddy plotting of the affair and its non-characters truly get, always adding at least an element of irritation to what should be perfectly fine giant monster action and actually perfectly fun giant monster mythology.

In short: Tomb Raider (2018)

Young and adventurous Lara Croft (Alicia Vikander) follows the traces of her long missing action archaeologist father (Dominic West). Eventually she teams up with Chinese boat captain Lu Ren (Daniel Wu) and ends up on an uncharted island where an evil organization is searching for the tomb of the same Japanese death goddess her father was obsessed with.

This is one of the recent major mainstream Hollywood films I honestly wish I would have enjoyed more. I do like the approach the film shares with the last couple of Tomb Rider videogames to tone the exploitation factor down quite a bit from the incessant leer of the Angelina Jolie films. I also think Alicia Vikander turns out to be a fine choice for the more human version of Lara Croft; and I enjoyed a couple of director Roar Uthaug’s Norwegian films (particularly the genre-wise pretty relevant Escape) quite a bit.

Unfortunately, Uthaug’s film also takes some of the less great elements of the current of Tomb Raider games on board. There is the pretty damn tedious attempt at providing what is still a superhumanly capable pulp heroine with a “relatable background”, so there is a whole slew of scenes about Lara’s tragic Daddy problems to go through, which is about as interesting and exciting as it sounds, and also so badly written it does nothing at all to make our heroine more relatable, but only quite a bit more boring than she needs to be. I’d suggest if you have a character who will eventually get around to have biggish pulpy adventures, trying to give her a believably human background is at best unnecessary, at worst, as it is here, a hindrance to the film ever actually getting around to showing the audience what it actually came to see the character do. I believe what I’m saying is that, instead of daddy issues, I’d rather have seen some Tomb Raiding.

Alas, the first and only tomb to be raided here (unless you count the hidden room in Daddy’s crypt, though you might also count it as an attempt by the film to go all metaphorical on us) pops up 74 minutes into the movie. Of course, this reluctance to get to the actual meat the title promises is another weakness the film shares with the newer videogames. Instead of tomb raiding, we get more daddy issues, a pretty boring villain (Walton Goggins), and a handful of survivalist action sequences. I suspect these scenes are why Uthaug was hired in the first place, but compared to the much cheaper, not overly CGI-laden Escape, they are not terribly good, and demonstrate a curious inability to create action sequences that take place in what feels like actual physical spaces; they are indeed much less convincing than those in the videogames. It’s possible a degree of inexperience of the director with CGI is in part responsible here, but then, a lot of blockbusters now are directed by people who have never made green screen heavy film before and do not suffer from this.


It’s certainly still a watchable enough film – this is no Cruise-Mummy – but it is neither the wild, female-lead pulp adventure of my dreams nor the survivalist yet emotionally gripping thriller with some surprise rage zombie-ism the production company was probably aiming for.

In short: Escape (2012)

Original title: Flukt

Norway, in 1363. In the aftermath of the black plague, what little there had been of social order is destroyed, leaving the remaining population fighting for their lives or attempting to flee for more prosperous shores.

The family of young Signe (Isabel Christine Andreasen) attempts the latter, but an encounter with a group of bandits under the leadership of a woman named Dagmar (Ingrid Bolsø Berdal) leaves everyone except the teenager dead. For Signe, Dagmar has other plans. Dagmar has adopted a girl named Frigg (Milla Olin), and now has ambitions to get her hands on a little sister for her. Trouble is, Dagmar can’t get children, so she decides Signe would make a nice replacement birth mother for a prospective sister, notwithstanding the fact that Signe’s hardly a woman, or minor things like the rape(s) that are necessarily part of this plan.

Frigg isn’t quite at the point where she’s as ruthless as Dagmar yet, though, and frees Signe. Because one of Dagmar’s men witnesses the deed, Frigg flees together with the older girl, which of course does make Dagmar’s resulting attempts to get her “daughter” back rather more enthusiastic than I’d imagine them to have been if they had only been about Signe.

I know Escape’s director Roar Uthaug from the generic competence of the first Cold Prey film, that of course also starred Ingrid Bolsø Berdal though in a rather more pleasant role, so I mostly expected the film at hand to be about the same – competent but lacking in substance or imagination.

Turns out I was wrong again, for while Escape is certainly a slickly made film, it’s also one with a personality of its own that adds more than enough interesting, even surprising, elements to its basic historical adventure set-up. For the most part, it’s the film’s tight focus that impresses most about it, Uthaug’s ability to tell a tale Hollywood would bloat up to two and a half hours in less than one and a half, without ever losing control or keeping things too superficial. There’s a leanness and sparseness on display that fits Norway’s – quite breathtakingly photographed – landscape as well as it fits the way the characters’ medieval lives are by necessity turning out.

Uthaug is particularly good at providing the film’s main characters with additional dimensions and life in just the same way: Dagmar has a tragic past that explains a lot of what she is doing and why she does it without the film ever feeling the need to excuse her with it, and Signe’s guilt for the death of her family makes perfect sense as the driving factor even for the on paper slightly preposterous (and pretty final girl-like) finale. The film never gets soppy there, nor does it fall into the trap of explaining too much – there’s a clear belief in the audience understanding meaningful gestures even when they are small on display. The actors for their parts do know how deliver these gestures well.

Consequently, the film’s well-filmed genre action is grounded as a tale of actual human beings rather than the adventures of walking and talking tropes, and becomes more meaningful, more effective, and just more human, by it, making Escape a movie well worth watching.

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