Ernst Home: Sci-Fi Channel does a stealth "Siegfried"

Sci-Fi Channel does a stealth Siegfried

This past week, the Sci-Fi Channel aired an "original" miniseries: Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King, starring (among others) legendary Swedish actor Max von Sydow. The preview ads for the show in the past couple of months used a pompous narration along the lines of "...long before there was the Lord of the Rings, there was a story about one warrior, two women...", et cetera, blah blah blah. So I figure, either this is a movie about some medieval three-way or (more likely) just another of these cheesy Sci-Fi low-budget "originals". (Sing along, in your best Ethel-Merman-in-Annie-Get-Your-Gun voice, "Oh, there's NO budget like LOW budget...") But ... Max von Sydow? You wouldn't expect an actor of that quality if the movie were really bad, would you? (Well, then again, there was the craptastic nightmare that was Judge Dredd, but we'll conveniently sweep that one under the rug - maybe Max owed serious back taxes that year, or something. And don't even try to bring up Flash Gordon - that was actually very funny, in an incredibly-gay-homoerotic-Sci-Fi-opera-buffa sort of way. Just try and tell me you don't still get chills when you hear Queen's Freddie Mercury screeching, "Flash! AA--AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!")

Of course from 9-10 pm the night of the first-episode airing I had to watch the latest episode of 24, so only tuned into DK:TDK in brief snatches, during the commercials. What little I saw had me saying, "oh man, they totally ripped off the Ring of the Nibelungen" (i.e. Siegfried, Brünhilde, multiple 5-hour operas by Wagner and all that.) Anyway, once 24 was over and I switched to Dark Kingdom full-time I realized that they weren't ripping off The Ring, they were actually *doing* The Ring, and in fact being halfway-decently faithful to the story - there are multiple versions, so one can pick and choose elements from each according to taste, much as Wagner did - with a few embellishments. (E.g. the meteor impact that first brings Siegfried and Brünhilde together, and provides the metal for Siegfried's legendary sword, Balmung - that was actually a nice addition, since an otherworldly sword deserves an otherworldly origin - and of course dragons = fire from the sky.) I have no idea why SciFi Channel gave it the cheesy title they did (the original release title was the somewhat more apropos Ring of the Nibelungs), but they put together a decent cast (besides von Sydow as Siegfried's adoptive blacksmith father they have excellent British actor Julian Sands - also playing the heavy in this year's 24, as it happens - in the role of Hagen von Tronje), German star Benno Fürmann (Joyeux Noel, this year's French foreign Oscar nominee), Kristanna Løken (Terminator 3) and excellent German director Uli Edel, some fantastic scenery and fine music (though perhaps not quite up to Wagnerian standards) and made a rollicking good movie, even though it's obviously been done on a much more limited budget than Peter Jackson had for The Lord of the Rings. Apparently this was the culmination of a 20-year-long dream project for director Edel, and it really shows in the attention to detail both in the story and the staging - very much a labor of love. Lots of humorous little lines to lighten the what would otherwise be a pretty somber mood, too.

And the bit about "long before the Lord of the Rings..." turns out to be more than mere advertising hyperbole - it's quite literally true, since the Siegfried saga has its origins in Norse mythology (Beowulf and the Volsung saga, which predate even the Arthurian legends), and even the "modern" versions of the story are nearly a thousand years old. A whole mess of interesting literary history at work here - you've got elements of Greek mythology (the bit about the Linden leaf landing on Siegfried's back as he bathes in the protective dragon's blood is clearly the Achilles legend in a new form), the Hebrew bible (child Siegfried's escape from the enemy by floating down the river = Moses in the bulrushes), the nordic Volsung saga and poetic Edda inspired the Nibelungenlied, which inspired later tales ranging from Sleeping Beauty (in the original Nordic version, Brünhild was a Valkyrie who angered the god Odin, so he made her fall asleep in a ring of fire on the Hindarfjall glacier, from which she could only be awakened by the bravest and strongest man - sound familiar?) to Tolkien's Hobbit and LOTR trilogy, to Xena the Warrior Princess. But whether you care about the literary baggage or not, it's definitely worth a watch - Enjoy!

[DVD Note: apparently the release of the Region 1 (U.S. and Canada format) DVD version is in conjunction with the Sci-Fi Channel airing. There's a link to that below, via the IMDB page, but *note* that the region 1 DVD version inexplicably cuts nearly a full hour off the version being aired on TV, so if you want the DVD, I suggest getting the Region 2 (European) version, not the U.S. I found the latter available at a good price on Amazon.de, but if that's all you're getting, the shipping cost to the U.S. basically doubles the cost. In my case, as I have relatives in Europe and my sister is visiting them in May, I just ordered a couple other German-language DVDs in order to get the total above 20 Euros and thus qualify for free shipping in the EU, had amazon.de send the DVD to my relatives, and asked my sister to bring them back with her. Holy six degrees of Free Super Saver Shipping^TM, Batman!]