Ring of the Nibelungs

Ring of the Nibelungs is a fantasy adventure drawn from the medieval Nibelungen legend. A prince is left orphaned when invaders kill his royal parents, and a blacksmith named Eyvind raises the boy as his own son, unaware of his true heritage. Years later a meteor falls from the sky and draws the young man, now a skilled smith, toward his fate. He meets the Icelandic warrior queen Brunnhild, and the two are bound to each other, while a dragon, a cursed treasure and the politics of a threatened kingdom pull him into a larger conflict.

Uli Edel directed and co-wrote the film with Diane Duane and Peter Morwood, placing it between Julius Caesar and The Baader Meinhof Complex in the run of features he has directed. Benno Fürmann plays Siegfried, with Kristanna Loken as Brunnhild, Alicia Witt as Kriemhild, Julian Sands as Hagen, Samuel West as Gunther and Max von Sydow as Eyvind. It was made as a television movie on a budget of about 23 million dollars, shot across Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy and South Africa.

On IMDb the film holds a rating of 6.6 from roughly 10,000 votes, while on TMDB it stands at 6.3 from about 160 votes. The wider IMDb sample settles somewhat higher than the smaller TMDB one, and both point to a modest, mixed response rather than a widely praised production, which fits a large-scale small-screen epic from the mid-2000s.