The Seventh Seal (1957)
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
When disillusioned Swedish knight Antonius Block returns home from the Crusades to find his country in the grips of the Black Death, he challenges Death to a chess match for his life. Tormented by the belief that God does not exist, Block sets off on a journey, meeting up with traveling players Jof and his wife, Mia, and becoming determined to evade Death long enough to commit one redemptive act while he still lives.
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What critics compared The Seventh Seal to
I would compare it visually to the architecture of a cathedral or church, where the black & white creates similar themes of what Ingmar Bergman did with The Seventh Seal , The Virgin Spring , Through a Glass Darkly , and Winter Light .
At different points, the look of “The Tragedy of Macbeth” will recall a silky foreboding film noir, a Val Lewton horror film, a Sirkian soap opera, the cloistered dreamscapes of Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal” and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s “Ordet,” the fascist hellscape of Orson Welles’ “The Trial,” the hallowed glow of “The Chronicle of Anna Magdalene Bach,” the operatic catacombs of “Ivan the Terrible,” and Welles’ 1948 version of “Macbeth.”
It begins with the imagery, which is lushly rendered in a Bergmanesque gothic greyscale and is inspired by both that master’s more fantastical work ( The Seventh Seal is a pretty clear point of comparison), Olivier’s Hamlet , and Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood .
Emerging, croaking and genderless, lips cracked and limbs bending impossibly, Hunter appears as unsettlingly alien as Bengt Ekerot was as Death in The Seventh Seal .
The classic tale itself is powerful and influential and morbid (yet still not Shakespeare’s most adored work), though this adaptation primarily serves to offer different actors and a somewhat original visual presentation (reminiscent of “The Seventh Seal” and German Expressionism, with an unusually energetic, cinematic showdown), which will surely appeal only to a select audience.
I am about out of astonishments for you, but buckle your seat belt for this one: The director, Dominic Sena , was inspired by Ingmar Berg man's “ The Seventh Seal ” (1957), that classic tale of a knight who returns from the Crusades and encounters Death on the road.
The Eastern European locations are sumptuous and the costumes authentic, but the dialogue is anachronistic and the climax mindless — though the lame film homages (The Seventh Seal!
Directed by Dominic Sera as a kind of giddy homage to Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal” — that is, if Bergman worked for Marvel Comics — “Witch opens with three terrified women accused of witchcraft.
A plague has ravaged everything and every place—at which point we realize that we’ve been watching the prequel for The Seventh Seal (1957).
It's The Seventh Seal meets Get Him to the Greek meets Lord of the Rings as if filtered through Uwe Boll's hack-tastic brain, only a guy named Dominic Sena (Swordfish, Gone in 60 Seconds) made it.
Now that they are back in the limelight, it's time to start spitballing ideas for a sequel (among them, an existential study of life's greatest conundrums, a 'la Ingmar Bergman's "The Seventh Seal").
The inside jokes on offer include references to The Silence of the Lambs, Boyz 2 Men, Danny Trejo, The Spy Who Loved Me, and, most hilariously, The Seventh Seal.
Alongside the more kid-targeted jokes we get some stuff for the adult crowd, too—hello, The Seventh Seal reference.
Featuring clever film references from The Seventh Seal to Silence of the Lambs, writers James Bobin and Nicholas Stoller are smart enough to fill this adventure with references to features that adults will appreciate.
A feature debut for the director, Mr. Webb, the film is an odd combination of self-referential, in the spirit of its lovers, and insistently referential in its wink-and-nod homages to such classics as “The Graduate” and “The Seventh Seal.”
The script, by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, references a lot of movies, from "The Seventh Seal" to "The Graduate," but the one it seems to be channeling the most effectively (and most unconsciously) is "Annie Hall."
(He’s less successful in a misguided parody of foreign-movie cliches: does anybody take “The Seventh Seal” as a touchstone anymore?) Deschanel doesn’t come off nearly as well, largely because Summer is rather a self-absorbed, hard character, and she plays it that way.
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…heavenly black-and-white sequences reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957)…
Imagine The Seventh Seal meets Defending Your Life and you’re there.
They’re chilly matchbox approximations of Bergman and Tarkovsky…
A late-scene nod to Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal” swaps dread for hope, transforming death into an embrace instead of a void.
Along the way we re-meet Jabba, the blob of evil from "Star Wars" and the Emperor himself (Ian McDiarmid), a black-cowled seventh cousin to Ingmar Bergman's Death in "The Seventh Seal."
We see a great deal more, however, of Darth and the Emperor, who looks uncannily like Death in "The Seventh Seal.''
As before, this movie incorporates influences from Silly Symphony to “The Seventh Seal,” from Tarzan to Pac-Man and combines these varying elements into a single story weave.
More time travel: It’s The Seventh Seal crossed with Naked Gun 33⅓ ; your boys are Step Brothers from other mothers.
The 1991 sequel, Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, is best known for an extended parody of Bergman's The Seventh Seal, in which William Sadler played Death.
A couple of years later, “Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey” arrived but instead of merely rehashing the time travel jokes from the first film, it went off in wild new directions—at one point becoming an inspired parody of Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal” as the two encounter the Grim Reaper (William Sadler) and challenge him to games like Battleship and Twister instead of chess—and wound up as a much funnier film than the first one.
Speaking of tributes, homages and remakes, there’s a version of Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal” as guns-‘n’-girls exploitation king Russ Meyer might have made it (that’s by Jake West), and a mysterious, allegorical “Frankenstein” fable from Serbian filmmaker Srdjan Spasojevic that feels like a collaboration between Pedro Almodóvar and Andrei Tarkovsky.
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The actors deliver a visceral and bughouse-intense variation on Ingmar Bergman marriage-is-hell psychodramas, even as von Trier evokes the haunted quality of Bergman’s medieval allegories (throwing in a shot of Dafoe’s head against a charcoal horizon that echoes Max Von Sydow in The Seventh Seal).
Then again, when the golden ticket manages to bring to life characters from (and, no I’m not kidding here) Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957), it’s hard to imagine much of the usual audience of young action fans the marketing targeted getting this concept at all.