This is one of my all-time favourite films, so I am watching it again tonight.
The movie has 33% on Rotten Tomatoes, and I really want to know what critics were expecting.
To be clear, I'm not saying that it is a great film because I happen to like it. Hell, I'm not even saying it is a "great film" in the sense that it is objectively one of the best ever made. There are certainly a few things to criticize. For instance, there is a good bit of talking and dialogue based exposition (though most of that is handled very well), and the cinematography isn't nearly as creative or visually stunning as another film with the same plot and setting could have been.
But... It has an exceptional score by Jerry Goldsmith, great performances, and really tight pacing. It's well edited, well written (originally by Michael Crichton), well directed (by John McTiernan who directed Die Hard), and the story is a fascinating, more realistic take on the Beowulf mythology... which remains pretty unique in all of cinema.
It also has the best treatment of people navigating language and cultural barriers of just about any film I've ever seen.
And at the end of the day, it's just a fun action movie about a team of viking warriors fighting an epic battle against a barbarian evil.
I've read plenty of reviews of it over the years, but I will never really understand why or how it got panned as much as it did. It was an early clue, for me, that a lot of reviewers simply have biases or interests that they can't really - or simply don't want to - overcome.