There have been so many films made about the Second World War — the total per IMDb, if you include TV episodes, is close to 5,000 — that at this point in time, a director needs to find a completely new angle to make the attempt seem worthwhile.
In that sense, Gunnar Vikene’s War Sailor (Krigsseileren), which recounts the plight of Norwegian merchant seamen who were a pivotal if forgotten part of the Allied effort, feels like it could be a worthy addition to the canon. And yet once you get past its subject matter and epic appeal, this is largely boilerplate stuff — from the predictable trajectories of its three protagonists to the bogus love story tossed in for no great reason, to its underlying message about honor and disregarded sacrifice.
It seems logical that this well-executed and highly polished feature (the budget was $10 million, but it looks like it cost five times that) will be serving as Norway’s foreign-language Oscar submission: it’s got a fair share of blood, guts and glory, as well as a Hollywood-style message about how greatly Norwegians suffered in a conflict that could have ended differently without their valiant contributions. Unsurprisingly, it’s been a major hit on home turf since it was released there late September.
But it also lacks both originality and something like a director’s voice. Vikene (Vegas), who penned the script himself, never manages to make the material his own, resorting to war movie clichés and paint-by-numbers storytelling, while failing to create characters that stand out from the pack. He and cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvien (Rams, The Innocents) do a terrific job making the bombing and battle sequences harrowingly real, with convincing VFX filling in the gaps, but those very same scenes somehow lack suspense.
Covering a period that begins before Germany’s invasion of Norway in 1940 and stretches all the way to the armistice and years afterwards, the story follows two sailors — the family man and galley cook, Alfred (Kristoffer Joner, The Wave), and the swarthy, single ship’s mate, Sigbjørn (Pål Sverre Hagen) — who are so desperate financially that they sign up for risky merchant marine service just as the war is beginning.
Part of a fleet of Norwegian ships, numbering over 1,000, that traversed the Atlantic amid constant Wehrmacht air raids and submarine attacks, these unarmed vessels were pivotal in keeping Allied supply lines open throughout the conflict. And men like Alfred and Sigbjørn, as well as a handful of their shipmates we get to meet, were pretty much sacrificial lambs whose lives mattered little in the scheme of the greater battle.
This sentiment is made loud and clear by Vikene as we follow the seafarers from one fateful disaster to another, until their ship is finally blown to smithereens and they’re left stranded on a raft with two fellow sailors, including a mortally wounded young man (played by Arthur Hakalahti, who provides the film’s only moving sequence). Meanwhile back in the port city of Bergen, Alfred’s wife, Cecilia (Ine Marie Wilmann, Troll), tries to protect their two little children from Allied bombings that are meant to take out the Nazi war apparatus, but inevitably take out schools and homes as well.
The characters are all more or less passive victims in a conflict they had little-to-no say in, which is an interesting idea in and of itself, and probably a reflection on Norway’s own position during WWII, but doesn’t exactly make for nail-biting drama. They tend to be reacting much more than acting, and feel more like cyphers thrown into a series of catastrophic events, with the film concerned with how well they can deal with trauma — especially Alfred, whose family life makes him all the more fragile.
This setup proves problematic after Vikene inserts several unnecessary plot twists into his story as a means to further stick the knife into the wound, as if surviving a major naval or bombing disaster weren’t already enough. Worst of all is a third act that has Sigbjørn coming back to Norway when the war is finally over and shacking up with the supposedly widowed Cecilia, the sexual tension between them arising at each passing glance, in a scenario we’ve seen roughly 5,000 times before.
There are echoes here of the love triangle between Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken and Meryl Streep in The Deer Hunter, which is also about a bunch of working class boys going off to a war that puts them through the wringer and then haunts them all the way back home again. But Vikene, despite a talent for making small-scale set-pieces feel much bigger, is no Cimino, and what his film is missing most of all isn’t a heart — it’s impossible not to feel empathy for all that Alfred, Sigbjørn and Cecilia experience — but a distinct personality. This is probably why War Sailor is both a strong Oscar candidate and a movie that’s unlikely to stick around much past awards season.
Director, screenplay: Gunnar Vikene
Cast: Kristoffer Joner, Pål Sverre Hagen, Ine Marie Wilmann
Producer: Marie Ekerhovd, Marsten Stöter, Pierre Ellul, Anika Psaila Savona
Executive producers: Axel Helgeland, Dirk Schürhoff, Michael Reuter, Kim Magnusson, Christian Bévort, Michael Fleischer, Marcus Clausen, Peter Jein
Cinematography: Sturla Brandth Grøvien
Production design: Tamo Kunz
Costume design: Stefanie Bieker
Editing: Peter Brandt, Anders Albjerg Kristiansen
Music: Pierre Voker Bertelmann
Production companies: Mer Film (Norway), Rohfilm Factory (Germany), Falkun Films (Malta)
World sales: Beta Cinema
In Norwegian, English, German
150 minutes
