Pathfinder (2007): a Viking epic that strays from the path but doesn't entirely lose its way

28 January 2008

Gerard Wood

Reviews of Marcus Nispel's Pathfinder are almost invariably bad. Of the 71 reviews counted on Rotten Tomatoes, 63 are negative, giving it a very poor rating of 11%. It is sledged as being adolescent, mindless, boring, gory, witless and uninspired (just as a warm up), and with such a weight of negative opinion behind it I suspected I'd be panning it too: where there's smoke, there's fire. Usually.

But not always.

I missed seeing Pathfinder at the cinema - I blinked and it was gone - and have only just seen the unrated edition on DVD, and there's no denying that some of the criticism the movie has garnered is justified. It is not for the faint hearted. Gore abounds. It is somewhat simplistic, with characterisation so remarkably shallow that it's surprising the one-dimensional cardboard cut-outs stand up at all. Worst of all, the historical foundation of the plot begins and ends with the arrival of Vikings in North America circa 1000 AD. There is no historical justification for the wanton carnage that Pathfinder's Vikings visit on the Indians and if our Scandinavian brethren are not scandalised by the depiction of their ancestors in this movie, I'd be most surprised.

My interest in Pathfinder was peeked early: I'm a sucker for the Viking epic. To be sure, Marcus Nispel's pedigree as a film maker wasn't all that inspiring - he cut his teeth on music videos and horror - but then again, who would have predicted that the director of Bad Taste, Meet the Feebles and Brain Dead would give us Lord of the Rings? Even less inspiring was the involvement of screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis, who penned the remarkably awful Alexander (Dir. Oliver Stone). Karl Urban's involvement (Lord of the Rings, The Bourne Supremacy and The Chronicles of Riddick) did have promise however.

But more than anything else the early appeal of Pathfinder was its focus on a rarely depicted historical encounter between Vikings and North American Indians. Pathfinder tells the story of a Viking boy, the sole survivor of a raiding party that reached the North American shore and set about brutally plundering the local villages before being ship wrecked. Ghost, as he is called, is raised by an Indian tribe, one of the People and yet an outsider. Years later when Vikings return to settle the land (and efficiently disinvest the current owners of the land and their lives) Ghost draws on his dual heritage to save the People.

There's no point dwelling on the implausibilities of any of this: don't expect an explanation for how Ghost, a self-taught swordsman, outfights the battle-hardened Viking warriors; or why the massively outnumbered Vikings pursue a brutal policy of hack and slay. In the end such considerations are irrelevant. This is not a historical movie.

And now it's time for me to go out on a limb: yes, Pathfinder is flawed and simplistic, but whether intentionally or not, there is considerable mythic depth to it. Its simplicity is that of myth, which is to say that it has hidden depths. Rather than giving us objective history (as if there is any such thing) what Pathfinder presents is the deep despair of indigenous people throughout history, outmatched and taken by surprise by the unstoppable drive of a technologically superior invading force, despair turned into myth, or at least a fantasy of survival.

It doesn't matter then that Ghost's fighting prowess is implausible, that he is a superior warrior to the battle hardened foe: myths abound with that. He is a great warrior. A hero. End of discussion. The Vikings are thus appropriately one dimensional because they are not perceived as human by the Indians: this is the Indians' story, and in it they are a peaceful and tolerant people (we usually believe this about ourselves) confronted by a faceless and unstoppable force intent upon taking all that they possess. From this perspective the Vikings are quite simply demonic.

(It is both sobering and instructive to consider that a similar depiction of the invader as faceless demon could apply to the more historically accurate "invasion" of the Americas (or Australia for that matter) several hundred years later. Given such a mythic perspective of the victim, how similar would these latter day European invaders appear to the demonic Vikings in Pathfinder?)

The fact that the Indians in Pathfinder need an outsider to save them is not then racist or patronising: history tells us that without intervention (which never comes) indigenous people are always defeated by the brute force and will of a technologically superior invader. The outsider that saves the people is thus a dream, a hope. A myth.

Pathfinder bears the hallmark visceral aesthetic of Frank Frazetta and Robert Howard's gory fantastical art; the action is typically superb and well choreographed. It has something of the comic book look of 300 but lacks its directorial or cinematographic skill. The dialogue is generally flat and uninspired but this is outweighed by the mythic quality of the story. I'm not saying that this level of sophistication was intentional, but dealing solely with the work as it stands, it seems to me to be a legitimate interpretation of what we see on screen.

As a point of interest, Pathfinder (2007) is based loosely on a Norwegian film from 1987, called Ofelas (Pathfinder in English).

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