Despite the constant bloodletting, the characters were attractive: Leofric the happy-go-lucky coward who does the right thing in the end Hrothgar the weary general always trying to rally his weary men for one more fight and Snorri the captured Viking who becomes a mainstay of the English at Hastings. The narration, in a good imitation of the style of Anglo-Saxon epic poetry, was mournful and measured, and the revelation of the narrator's identity at the end nicely rounded out one thread of the story. The decision to focus only on the ordinary foot-soldiers (to the extent that none of the three leaders had a single line to speak, and William did not even appear on screen) was a good one, since it allowed the story to represent the fate of peoples instead of just the fate of kings. For me, this film was a success because it captured that horrified sense of loss not only of a battle, or of lives, but of a whole culture and the 650-year history that had produced it.
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