Pathfinder
Rating: Do you like drinking games? Rentable, unless you like your bloodshed on the big screen.
Important to know: Massive amounts of violence, often sadistically so.
For the Gamer Chicks: Evidently the Vikings look like Chaos Warriors. Also mostly-naked Karl Urban. The lead female character has moments of three-dimensional greatness.
If you are a fan of fantasy, you recognize swords. The concept of a long, one or two-handed blade is familiar and expected. People were using swords hundreds and even thousands of years ago. Except in North America.
Have you ever taken a moment to think about the fact that Native Americans didn't have swords? We all know that guns were a new and frightening experience for them, but imagine seeing a man swinging this strange object, and not realizing just how much danger you were in.
Michelle Thrush's mother character has a stunning moment at the beginning of Pathfinder when she is first confronted with a sword. She is confused by the object, but recognizes the threat. She looks beyond the blade to see the frightened child holding it, and reacts with grace and compassion.
It's a moment that could have been the first of many similar moments in a nicely put-together and well-acted - if not ground-breaking and spectacular - film. Unfortunately for Pathfinder, all of its best elements are underused or overshadowed by the ridiculousness of the script.
The story is familiar. White people suck, Native Americans are peaceful and awesome, and the only way for a white person to stop sucking is to embrace a different culture. In this particular case, the horrid white people are Vikings. To be fair, these white men have a long and storied reputation of being awful, so it's not just a big cliche. The Native Americans are the Wampanoag, they build their villages along the shoreline and are savaged by the Vikings, either taken as slaves or slaughtered.
Evidently word of the massive slaughter didn't quite reach Thrush's character (who is never named) because she was out on her own just in time to find a freezing Viking boy in the ruins of a wrecked ship. The obligatory hemming and hawing by the tribal elders ensues, and of course, the boy is taken into the tribe. He grows up to be Karl Urban, here called Ghost, and as is to be expected, he his haunted by his past and unsure of his place.
Mercifully for him, the Vikings come back. This gives him the opportunity to A: make peace with his origins, B: find his place in his new home and C: get the girl of his dreams. Unfortunately for everyone else, two-thirds of the cast has to die for Ghost to achieve all of that.
As I said, it's a familiar tale, and we love it. We've seen it done by Kevin Costner and Tom Cruise and dozens of other actors, and we keep coming back. Which is why this film is so disappointing.
The biggest problem is the vagueness. It's location is simply "North America," but the Wampanoag, Wikipedia informs me, were mostly in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. This makes the final scenes set amid enormous snow-capped mountains ridiculous. The Vikings ostensibly want to settle in this new land, but they brought no supplies, constructed no settlement, and have no women with them. Females are rather necessary when it comes to settling. There is also no explanation why Ghost was the only boy along for the ride. Perhaps it was take your son on the raid day in Norse-land. No one has a name except for Ghost. The credits tell you people have names, but they are never spoken, or if they are, I missed them entirely. It's difficult to care about anyone when you don't know who they are. The titular character the Pathfinder (Russell Means) is confusing. "Pathfinder" is clearly a title, but with his particular group he seems to be chief and shaman all rolled into one - it is never made clear if "Pathfinder" is a literal or metaphorical title.
The one point in which the vagueness works is that the Vikings have no faces. They are either completely covered by helmets at all times, or buried beneath tangled hair, grime and dark blue paint. This is a good costume choice, because it helps Ghost stand out as much among them as he does from his adopted people. It also makes them scarier to look at, like the demons they are feared to be.
However, any intimidating factor is squashed by their horrific stupidity. Evidently this race of hardened warriors has never heard the phrase "it's a trap" before. You may be distracted from their stupidity by the random and awful stock footage of avalanches clearly shot on different film than the rest of the movie. Or perhaps you'll have a headache after watching the confusingly shot fight scenes, which are too dark and erratic to be sure of what is happening, with moments of clarity that are either amusing and gory, or just gory.
The cast does what it can with the script, but it's very hard to really sell rotten dialog. The Vikings speaking in some Norse tongue was a nice touch, some bad dialog really does work better in print. Their language made the fact that the Natives spoke English a bit odd, however.
Urban can always be counted on for the big baby seal eyes of tortured frustration right before he convincingly defeats six giant villains, he's had experience fighting Uruk-hai and The Rock after all. Russell Means is a fan favorite in the realm of tribal magical badasses, and he's solid here. Leading lady Moon Bloodgood (notably not Native American) flutters between moments of awful plot-serving and amusing fabulousness. The rest of the cast are simply familiar archetypes, doing what they can as plot devices.
There is nothing I hate more in a movie than wasted potential. With all the time, money and talent spent on a production, most movies should be so much better than they are. Pathfinder is especially disappointing because it could have been so cool.
To see my original thoughts, click http://duosiceprincess.livejournal.com/456398.html#cutid1
