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Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

This film was terrible, terrible! As I said in my title, Adolf Hitler loved this film because it put the British in a very bad light. Among other things, Hitler was not known for his good taste! Yes, this film has other problems. First of all, its depressing! A guy (Virgen) gets food for his family, but is captured by the British and held prisoner for five years. When Virgen, on bended knee, tearfully explains what his skiff was doing in the water, the British laugh in his face. When he's finally released from prison, he comes home to see that his wife and child have starved to death. A bit later in the film, he goes out to rescue a yacht in trouble and sees that it's none other than the commander of the ship who imprisoned him five years earlier, along with his wife and baby. Herein lies another problem. It gets kind of fuzzy about whether or not Virgen ultimately rescues these people. You see someone else do that while Virgen is raging at them. Then there's the ending, which I will go ahead and tell you because I don't want you to waste your time on this turkey. Now, in the scene before the end, Terje is waving at these British people. I could have ended there (and gotten a "2" or "3" from me). But nooooooooooooooo! He dies and it shows his grave! Gee whiz! Again, I say, do yourself a favor and DO NOT watch this!

"Terje Vigen" is one of the best films of the 1910s. It's extraordinarily well crafted for 1917, with some brisk, modern editing (e.g. the capture scene) and, especially, outstanding photography throughout. In this respect, the only slight criticism I could give the film is that it's rather short, at about 53 minutes on the Kino DVD; regardless, the pacing is good. The intertitles from Ibsen, despite whatever is lost in translation, I think also add to the film's rhythm and mood.Most of the drama takes place outside, at sea, which avoids some of the dimensional and framing awkwardness, or theatricality, of shooting indoors that so afflicted early filmmakers. Much of it also occurs at night, and the reconstructed blue tinting is very good. Moreover, director Victor Sjöström and cinematographer Julius Jaenzon's photography is not only naturalistic; they make nature into the defining presence of the picture. They do so quite economically, too. Reportedly, the location was less than ideal--settling for the closer and calmer shoreline of Stockholm rather than the real Norwegian island and including in the story a man-o'-war and village, both of which they show very little of. Yet, they didn't need them.Sjöström seems to have been one of the first to make nature a central character in his films in a significant way and returned to the conflict between man and nature in such films as "The Outlaw and His Wife" (1918) and "The Wind" (1928). In "Terje Vigen", it's not only the warship or its commander that challenges and affords him, or provides the plot, but also the stormy waters, the foliage that disguises him and his boat as part of the natural environment, the isolation of the island, the entrapment of the sea. Nature as a catalyst and reflection of the plot and character development become most evident in the film's climax.To top it off, Sjöström plays the lead, Terje Vigen, in a restrained and convincing performance, especially in his transformation from robust youth to embittered and isolated old man. There's no wonder upon seeing these early performances in his own films that later he would so easily fall back upon acting after his directorial career ended. By 1917, however, Yevgeni Bauer and D.W. Griffith were the only two directors to my knowledge to display such mastery, although for very different uses, of the art form.

If this movie had been made in 1923, I'd have been more blasé, but for 1916 it's nothing short of miraculous.The open-air filming is smooth and well-executed. The emotional rawness is hit hard but never gets overheated. The acting is intense but does not stray into laughable "stagger-and-clutch." Dutiful fidelity to Ibsen's poem may cramp the subtitles, but never interferes with masterful story-telling in the film itself.There is one sequence, in which a launch from a British warship destroys a fisherman's rowboat and then attempts to hunt down the fisherman while he's swimming for his life underwater, that is an absolute classic that will live in your memory.This film is short, but very powerful, and worth going the extra mile to see.

'Terje Vigen' is probably the purest example in Sjostrom's work of the conflict between the natural world and civilisation. It is this theme, his facility with action narratives, and his privileging of monumental landscapes that bring him closer to the American Western than his most famous compatriot and pupil, Ingmar Bergman.'Terje' is based on an epic poem by Ibsen, a writer most famous for his plays. The plot is simple enough - Terje Vigen is a salty old sea-dog in the early 19th century, tired of a hard, marine life, who settles down to blissful domesticity with his weaving wife and young child. After five years, however, the Napoleonic Wars break out, and the resulting blockade by the English forces the small community into starvation. Vigen decides to row to a village across the sea to smuggle food for his family; evading the English naval lookout on his way out, he is captured on his return, and thrown into jail for five years. Returning a forgotten man, he finds his house occupied by strangers and his family long dead. He becomes a broken, reclusive lighthouseman; one stormy night, he rescues his captor with his family. Will Vigen get his bitter revenge?'Terje' features sequences still unequalled in sea dramas - Vigen's clambering onto the huge yardarm to unfurl the sail; the entire smuggling sequence, from the silvery ripples of the water as Vigen rows away from his wife, radiating away from her towards his doom, to his first evasion from the navy, hiding in an improvised hole, to the terrifying hunt, a brilliantly edited suspense sequence, with one man, old Vigen, chased by a crew of young professionals, to the messy, tortuous climax, Vigen struggling and diving, being shot at by frankly inept sailors.These action scenes, in which the natural world is an impassively fierce presence, are contrasted with the domestic - the scenes where he greets his wife and first meets his new child and plays with it are as touching and believable images of family life as anything in cinema ('Thomas Graal's first child' confirms Sjostrom's rare facility with children), while the communal scenes of near-famine are harrowing.But there is no easy split between nature and civilisation - Vigen's house is ominously framed by the vast sea, while his adventures on the waves are provoked by domestic needs. Neither is there a simplistic dichotomy between the 'truth' and 'honesty' of nature, and the hypocrisy of society. The latter might cause the murderous war and Vigen's imprisonment, but it also tempers Vigen's warped nature in the aftermath of his loss, where the sight of a family checks his destructive urges. The film closes with an astonishing image, a lingering shot of his family's grave overlooking the sea at sunset. It has an immense, metaphysical, enigmatic, uncanny impact, somewhat frightening in its restfulness, that is closer to Bergman (the sing-song, ye-olde-Englishe translation of Ibsen's verse in the intertitles are unintentionally, distractingly comic)