Espen Sandberg

Espen Sandberg's films tend to have a horizon in them. Men set out across water, the land goes, and the camera stays with the men rather than the weather. Kon-Tiki (2012) puts a small crew on a raft in the Pacific and keeps its attention on the people aboard even as the effects, practical and digital, do a great deal of work around them. That is the thing he does best: a large, wet, expensive sequence that never loses track of who is in it.

He has almost never done it alone. He and Joachim Rønning have been making films together since they were boys in the 1980s, through Stockholm Film School, a production company founded in 1995 that began in commercials, and six features. Their first, Bandidas (2006), was a western comedy with Salma Hayek and Penélope Cruz. Max Manus: Man of War (2008) made their name at home. Kon-Tiki took that name abroad. Their model, by their own account, is the classical Hollywood adventure of Spielberg and Lucas and Lawrence of Arabia: clear stakes, big skies, a hero who wants to get somewhere. "We've always been attracted to epic stories," Sandberg said in 2013.

Then Hollywood handed them one. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (2017) was the pair's first studio film, and they were hired to do two things: get the series back onto the water and back to a sensible length. At 129 minutes they managed the second. Our review put most of the blame for the rest on Jeff Nathanson's script, which runs the first film again with the life let out, and that is fair. But a director's job includes noticing when there is no life in the pages, and here the pair did what competent pairs do. They shot it cleanly, staged one good robbery, gave Javier Bardem room to be a proper villain, and let Johnny Depp do an impression of himself. Critics noticed that the big set pieces looked flatter and more stage-bound than anything in Kon-Tiki, and so did we. We sat waiting for the sea to feel like the sea, the one thing this director can do in his sleep, and it never did.

Since then he has gone back, alone, to what he knows. Amundsen (2019), his first film without Rønning, is about a Norwegian explorer heading for the ice. We have not reviewed it and will not judge it here. But the choice tells you something. Give Sandberg a real expedition, with a destination and a man who might not reach it, and he is a safe, honest pair of hands. Give him a franchise and he will bring it in on time. Which of those you need tonight is your business.