Imagine, if you will, the 1990s. You’re making a movie. A movie that doesn’t satisfy your test audiences and requires numerous re-edits that drag your production roughly $15 million over budget. A movie whose director will be replaced by the creator of the novel you’re adapting. A movie whose film composer, Graeme Revell, will be replaced by Jerry Goldsmith. A movie starring Antonio Banderas at, arguably, the height of his popularity. A movie that Roger Ebert will pan and which will bomb so horribly at the box office that fuzzy studio math puts it as the #32 or #1 worst box office flop in history (adjusted for inflation). A movie with so many production problems that it caused Omar Sharif to temporarily retire from acting (1999-2003). In Sharif’s own words: I said to myself, ‘Let us stop this nonsense, these meal tickets that we do because it pays well.’ I thought, ‘Unless I find a stupendous film that I love and that makes me want to leave home to do, I will stop.’ Bad pictures are very humiliating, I was really sick. It is terrifying to have to do the dialogue from bad scripts, to face a director who does not know what he is doing, in a film so bad that it is not even worth exploring.” IMDb (2003) If you imagine all of that and think it’s just not possible that this movie could be shockingly pretty darn good, well, you’d be wrong. You see, the movie in question is The 13th Warrior, based on Michael Crichton’s Eaters of the Dead (1977)(itself a loose adaptation of Beowulf and the historical writings of Ahmad ibn Fadlan). And The 13th Warrior, I’m here to say, is surprisingly good in a campy “full of heart” sort of way. Why? I’m glad you asked.
