A work (novel, movie, whatever) only gets the story-behind-the-story treatment when it's been part of conventional knowledge for so long that the audience gets all the little in-jokes, can appreciate the asides, the irony, etc. To look at it another way, a work only gets the story-behind-the-story treatment when it's been overdeveloped in so many other directions that burrowing into the myth of its own origins is about all that's left. This is what Shakespeare in Love does for Romeo and Juliet, what Love and War tries to do for Farewell to Arms. This is also what the 13th Warrior tries to do for Beowulf--to tell it from the POV of a minor/forgotten participant in the 'actual' event, of which Beowulf is a loose retelling. The thing is, however, Shakespeare in Love had the advantage of coming right on the heels of 199x's Romeo + Juliet, meaning the play was still fresh in our minds, we were already piqued for a little more iambic pentameter, please. The 13th Warrior doesn't have such an advantage: disregarding the recent sci-fiBeowulf (not released in America),there's been nothing to leave us hungry for Old English, mead, all that. Writer/director Michael Crichton (along with Diehard's John McTiernan) was likely aware of this poor timing, too, so, for the big screen, this adaptation of his historical novel Eaters of the Dead draws more on, say, the enthematic swordplay of Braveheart, the 'good fight' against-all-odds feel of Starship Troopers, and, further back, all the Dungeons & Dragons-type movies (Flesh and Blood(1985), Excaliber, etc.) which also manage to assemble a rag-tag group into some honorable world-saving campaign. In The 13th Warrior, that rag-tag group is composed of twelve Viking volunteers, plus the initially-reluctant exiled Arabian poet Ibn Fadlan (Antonio Banderas). The world this group has to save is a village in Scandinavia. What they have to save the village from are creatures of legend--eaters of the dead. Which is to say transgressors of one of our most fundamental taboos: cannibalism. And, when fighting cannibals, you're automatically the good guy, which is how Crichton manages to erase any raping and pillaging Eric the Viking-type associations, making the campaigners honorable. In addition, though--or, to really establish the bad guys' inhumanity--the bad guys are never really personified, which makes Ibn Fadlen and Co.'s series of skirmishes with them impersonal, as it would be with a mass of animals. And this isn't necessarily a weakness, but more of an identification trick: the bad guys are as dark and mysterious to us as they are to Ibn Fadlan and Co. It does have a flipside, though: when the battle gets pared down to the individual level, it doesn't have that same finality you get with, say, Conan and Thulsa-Doom. Meaning we're not sure it's over when it is, in fact, over. If that was the only flaw, The 13th Warrior could possibly be a great movie. But there's more. There's the castle-intrigue in the opening sequence, which establishes so little that it's never mentioned again. There's Ibn Fadlan's love interest in the village they're saving, which feels tacked on. There's Antonio Banderas playing a devout Muslim. There's some unwisely foregrounded translation difficulty (Old English to Latin, then Latin to Arabian, which is cinematically rendered in English, etc) which slows things down considerably. On the plus side, though, there is a lot of flashy AD&D-type sword and horseplay, there's an ancient woman who talks with Yoda-syntax ('Seek you me?'), and there's even something of a transformation in Ibn Fadlan, which allows him to put pen to paper again, write that epic. More than all that, though, what The 13th Warrior leaves you with is a distinct nostalgia, not for a period in history that's lost, but for a period in history that never really was, at least as it's presented on-screen. Which is to say it does get us to buy its illusion, if only for a while. (c) 1999 Stephen Graham Jones
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