A Film Canon

Positioned somewhere between a lost episode of Hercules or Xena and a rough draft of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy, John McTiernan's adaptation of Michael Crichton's Eaters Of The Dead went through several reshoots - and, as a result, it contains the germ of three quite distinct films, all charming in their way, if not quite adding up to a coherent or sustained product. Nevertheless, they're not sufficiently incongruous to give the feel of three completely discrete films either, since they all play out as exercises in affectionate anachronism, and are positioned to become more anachronistic as the narrative proceeds. Given that the narrative is already a quest back in time - exiled Arab urbanite Ahmad ibn Fadlan (Antonio Banderas) falls in with a tribe of Norsemen, and joins them to defend an even more remote Norse tribe from a prehistoric tribe - this fills out what peripatetic momentum is missing, and gives the film more coherence that it might otherwise have had. In essence, McTiernan moves from the lush atmospherics of his 80s output (at times, it's pretty much Anglo-Saxon Predator), to the fortification and siege tactics of The Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven series, to an almost unbelievably charming and antiquated recourse to darkness as a scare tactic. It's at this point that the register moves from historical fantasy to horror, and yet it's not the atmospheric darkness, the trademark of the Lewton cycle, but theatrical darkness, the trademark of the Universal cycle - the darkness that exists partly to conceal props, costumes and make-up, to conceal the theatrical apparatus that underlies an ostensibly cinematic experience. Appropriately, it's also at this point that Michael Crichton's part in the direction makes itself most felt as a tendency to direct dialogue, rather than actors, words against a black screen - and, while this does tend towards a grating flatness, less stage-bound than page-bound, it also elegantly subsume the film's anachronistic arc into a movement from cinema, to theatre, to spoken poetry. It also allows Crichton to condense the film's distinctive vision of Europe, in which Arabia is at the civilised centre, and the main exotic threshold is to the North, to the moment at which Fadlan teaches himself to 'hear' English in the barbaric rabble of the rowdy Norsemen. Nevertheless, Crichton ultimately works best when supported by McTiernan, and the film is ultimately carried by the collaborative set-piece that constitutes the third act - an atmospheric cave battle in which a subterranean waterfall helps diffuse black, grey and brown into a myriad spray of shades, and the film's entire epic topography, from ocean to mountains, is retraversed underground, in a fairly explicit homage to the Indiana Jones style of homage buried somewhere within the film's multiple cuts and drafts.