Pathfinder

This is almost undoubtedly the movie that got director Marcus Nispel the gig to helm the 2011 Conan reboot that failed so miserably. Nominally a remake of a 1987 Finnish film of the same name, it is actually almost a completely different movie save for some elements of the basic setup. With a strong cast including Karl Urban, Clancy Brown, Moon Bloodgood and Russel Means, this had all the pieces to be a solid mid-budget action film, and yet it somehow fails to come together.

Karl Urban plays Ghost, a man who was marooned as a child on the shores of North America by a Viking ship and then left to be raised by the Native Americans who found him. Despite having lived among the natives, he is still held as an outcast by some of his tribe. Once he has grown to adulthood, more Vikings turn up, led by the villainous Clancy Brown as Gunnar, and Ghost has to use his knowledge of his former people to defend the Native Americans from the savage raiders.

It’s a bloody film if you get the unrated version, though the theatrical release was cut down for some unknown reason. There are impalements, severed heads, stabbings and spilled entrails left and right. All the blood and gore is, refreshingly, practical, rather than painted on splashes of CGI red. People are shot with arrows, hacked up with swords and axes, skewered on sharp stakes, and burned alive.

Nispel is doing his best work here as a director, and that means he gets some really gorgeous shots. They filmed in British Columbia, and took great advantage of the snow-covered, mountainous vistas all around. Nispel has a great eye for composition, and he uses light and color to make really dramatic images. True, he abuses the digital color correction pretty shamelessly, but it was 2007, everybody was doing that.

As a historical effort, the movie is a disaster. True, we know that the Vikings visited North America long before the age of exploration, and that they did battle with the people they called “skraelings”, but we have no evidence that their entry into the New World was with violent or rapacious intent. In fact, Viking raiders would never have voyaged to the Americas when richer targets were much closer to home. Explorers and colonists traveled to Greenland and later Newfoundland, not reavers.

The look of the Vikings in the movie is simultaneously outlandish and awesome. Vikings never wore horned helmets, nor did they wear plate armor. The Norsemen in Pathfinder are made into almost inhuman monsters by their design, as if the director held up a print of Frazetta’s Death Dealer and said “make it like this”. They wear horned helmets with goggles that cover their eyes, so all you see of most of them is a demonic helmet, a huge beard, and teeth. The actors apparently wore football pads under their costumes to make their armored shoulders look huge and intimidating. The swords and axes look entirely fanciful, and spiked flails are used prominently, when such weapons were never used by Vikings and in fact may not have existed at all.

I would be interested to see a Native take on the Amerindian people in this movie, as they pretty much just seem like standard white stereotypes. (The screenwriter, Laeta Kalogridis, is of Greek ancestry) The movie does get points for casting actual native actors and actresses, though the great Russel Means is criminally underused.

Most of the problem is that Nispel, as a director, is not good at building or maintaining tension. The movie is slow to start, and proceeds at a lumpy, uneven pace throughout. He often uses slow-mo just to highlight a cool image, but then the image doesn’t mean anything – it just looks good. The action scenes are poorly planned-out, as the layout of the physical space is unclear, and the number and disposition of enemies is not given, so the battles have no shape to them. You need to know how many bad guys there are, you need to know what each side is trying to do and what happens if they win or lose, otherwise your action scenes have no shape and just go on until they arbitrarily stop.

The themes of savage peoples battling each other in a harsh landscape is very Sword & Sorcery, and Ghost stands out as a good basis for an S&S hero, even if he never really seems to step up and catch fire. The characterization in the movie is generally weak, and that makes the whole thing also seem unimportant. This had all the elements to make a good movie, but despite some good bits in the action scenes and some beautiful cinematography, it remains strangely unengaging.