Severed Ways is a film that reminds me of a fable, of the story books I read as a child, the ones with big images of a dark and imposing forest spilling out across the page, split by the spine of the book. Before the forest is the hero. He might be walking into it or standing at the edge, but the implication was always this: his destiny lay in the woods, the weird wilderness. The narrative was always straight, speaking of determined and unrelenting action rendered in simple typeface "He traveled on..." or "Once into the woods...." And, upon turning the page, there would be a sudden shift, an amazing passage of indeterminate time would find the hero suddenly confronted by a fantastic witch full of temptation and secrets or he might just as well be forced to fight a strange enemy upon an empty place.There is no new story to tell, the fables, the allegories stay with us. The Sagas, folk tales, the Baba Yaga, Aesop, Grimm. In these disparate branches of allegory lie the template for Severed Ways.In many ways, what we see in this film is at once the most happenstance and anthropological examination of an event that never was, it feels as if the drive of the narrative is to paint large, language-free landscapes of simple action. Travel. Eat. S#@t. F#@k. Fight. Die. And yet, there is a subtler language operating, one that doesn't speak in words, forsaking speech for the language expressed in the mountains, streams, trees and sounds of the forest, a forest that once stretched unbroken from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River, from south of Hudson's Bay to the Gulf of Mexico. A forest that had no name, no history in written words.Travel. Eat. S#@t. F#@k. Fight. Die. That is the simple ethos of this film.Watch this film like you are reading a fable and get over your clichéd expectations already.

Look, all anyone needs to know, is that this film Rocks, plain and simple. If you really wanna know what it must have been like to be a Viking surviving the perils of a young America- See this Movie. The three act formula that is so present in most all Hollywood films, has been abandon in "Severed Ways." If your strictly a fan of Buff Nordic men, raping, pillaging, giving loud speeches packed with bravado and axe on axe battles- see "Pathfinder"OR better yet, get hopped up on some over the counter medication, mix the Tobasco in with your Vaseline and watch the "13th Warrior". Free your minds and your ice-holes will follow- Into the woods...

...and where are YOUR cinematic masterpieces? How many Oscar winning films have you made, Jack? Severed Ways may have sucked, but at least they went out and actually tried to make a movie. I really hate all the would-be "Critics" here who do nothing but complain about how bad every movie is, but yet, haven't made anything worthwhile themselves. Jealousy isn't a very flattering thing, which most "Critics" seem to be.As far as the soundtrack is concerned, the music(although not really fitting into the movie very well), is at least different than the cookie-cutter music of almost every other "period" piece.

There obviously were some major exploratory discoveries unrecorded in history that no human being alive today knows about. This movie depicts one of them and the subtitle gives it its significance. The two lost Vikings represent two elements that have created the American character, the heathen and the Christian, both so western in character. Here we see the first dude on our soil. We graphically see the most important defecation in the history of North America, the first human waste to touch and fertilize its soil and perhaps ultimately to make it toxic. The defecation becomes a ritual act. If guns, germs and steel conquered the North American wilderness, here we have only steel and no long term conquest; The sound of steel on wood is an underlying rhythm in the film. And it is very prescient that some of the chopping is mindless. The sound of the axes is woven into the incredible sound track. The film is very much about music. It is the exquisite lyrical blending of music and image that make this movie totally mesmerizing. Very little dialogue is needed and very little is supplied. This movie is not for film illiterates who think that the best of the best of the Dogma films is just unsteady camera work. This film will polarize the audience and separate the mindful from the mindless. The mindful being those who will love this genre creating movie.