Ragnarok

(Not only) popular cinema is like a snake eating its own tail. Every new generation of filmmakers naturally draws on what they themselves watched during their childhood and adolescence, updating elements and motifs of past decades for themselves and new generations. This tendency became strongly apparent in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when films frequently reflected the popular and trash genres of the 1950s and 1960s – whether directly, such as in the retro Grease and Streets of Fire, or only in the form of thematic inspiration and updating, as in the work of the most influential popular director of the time, Steven Spielberg. In the present day, we have come to a phase when a generation raised on the pop culture of the 1980s is getting the space to realise their visions inspired by the icons of their childhood. After Super 8 and before Earth to Echo, we have here a Norwegian variation on the iconic films of Steven Spielberg, or rather of Amblin Entertainment. Ragnarok specifically draws from the Indiana Jones movies, Jurassic Park and The Goonies, while taking the formula of fantasy-imbued family adventure movies and enhancing it with Scandinavian legends and history. Unlike Spielberg’s boyhood films, the female characters and the motif of strengthening the family, typical of contemporary Scandinavian productions for children and adolescents, play a more prominent role here. Paradoxically, these elements are not sufficiently fleshed out and, as a result, the narrative rests on the shoulders of the central father character and the archaeologist Sigurd, which is the only shortcoming of an otherwise precisely shot film packed with suspense, adventurous escapades and surreal mythology. Instead of focusing on a single character in the manner of Indiana Jones, the film would have benefitted from giving more attention to the other characters in the team along the lines of Jurassic Park and The Goonies. On the other hand, perhaps the dramatic arc of the father, who reassumes the role of the hero in the eyes of his children, is an appropriate update of the aforementioned inspirations in a time of crisis for the traditional family. In the end, however, the film rather raises the question of what “fourth-hand pop culture”, i.e. films made as homages to films inspired by films derived from films of generations long past, will look like in thirty years. (06/01/2014)