A Scientist at the Movies Reviews by Greg Paris

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Title: Pathfinder

Date Viewed: 4/22/07

Details:

Karl Urban (Ghost)

Russell Means (Pathfinder)

Moon Bloodgood (Starfire)

Clancy Brown (Gunnar)

Director: Marcus Nispel

Score: 0

The Review: The people of the dawn versus the dragon people -- pseudo-anthropological mythology at its most mediocre.

Culture clash; cultural differences; first contact. This is a rich vein that can be, and has been frequently, mined for movie themes. I commented on this for The New World (historical drama), but it applies in diverse genres from science fiction (Heinlein's Starship Troopers), fantasy (any werewolf or vampire movie, e.g., Underworld), to interactions in the margin of human experience like Wicker Man, or Painted Veil. But for all that these ideas might be of value if they inform a mindset about current affairs, remember -- first, that it's fiction (except in vanishingly rare cases) and second, that it's entertainment, in the broader sense, and not likely to be taken seriously in any sense.

The early history of exploration and settlement of the northeastern American continent is fraught with questions and controversy, from Farley Mowat's Farfarers (a.k.a., in the British edition, Alban Quest) to Paul Chiasson's Island of Seven Cities. Since I happened to have read both of these in the past 9 months, my mind was already prepared, and I simply *had* to see Pathfinder.

The time is approximately 600 years before Columbus. The background prelude indicates that the Vikings tried settling in the Americas around that time but that "something stopped them," thus giving rise to the scriptwriter's (fictional) myth of the Ghost. The character Ghost (Urban) is the orphaned son of a rampaging Viking adventurer, raised by the pastoral tribe who found him in the wreckage of a rather odd longboat, remnants of an early failed voyage to the Northeast American coast. The timeframe indicated is clearly intended to correspond to the Skraeling myths of the Viking sagas, and maps to the early tribes of the Algonquin and Iroquois federation in second millennium, pre-European America. And just in case you didn't get the hint, early in the film you watch the natives dancing around the fire with rhythmic accompaniment -- a very non-subtle, totally inappropriate nod to a native American stereotype.

Ghost is clearly caught between two cultures -- as Matthew Arnold put it, "wandering between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born.. .." (Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse). Whether grounded in "real" myth or not, Ghost should be a monomythic hero in the Joseph Campbell mold (Hero of a Thousand Faces) -- but is he? Feel free to check the wikipedia entry for a succinct summary of the stages, but you'll find that only a few of the typical steps are included in this otherwise scattershot script. Admittedly, a fictional hero will often only illustrate a few of the monomyth tenants, but here we have something closer to the Kurt Vonnegut contrarian position: "Hero gets into trouble; hero gets out of trouble."

Anyway, the plot that the script cares about is mostly the violent confrontation between the Vikings and the native tribes, disintermediated by Ghost as both combatant and bridge. The blood-letting is somewhat dulled by the near monochrome cinematography used, but this is never a gentle, pastoral contact story. The Viking grunts are provided in part by Clancy Brown (ex-Highlander's villain Kurgan), and the love interest by an exotic Moon Bloodgood.

Of flaws, there are many, varying from inappropriate anthropology to bizarre geography. The most egregious is the topography, with serious mountains overly closely located to forested oceanic shores. After all, this should be the time-worn Acadian orogeny, not the Rockies. The proximity of such serious winter mountaineering to coastal near rain-forest conditions presents a cognitive dissonance of monumental proportion, at least for those few of us who think they're familiar with the northeast American and Canadian Atlantic coast. (This is not supposed to be the Olympic peninsula of Washington state.) But superceding the problems is some curious aerial photography and spectacular landscapes, even if they're not completely regional.

Pathfinder is not horrible -- it's just not very good. I can see why its release was delayed for so long: I remember seeing trailers for this well over a year ago. I suspect it might have been defused by Apocalypto and by the rush to get it out before summer blockbuster fever hits. It has a comic-book feel, but then, it is based on the eponymous Darkhorse issue.

(22-Apr-07)

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