PATHFINDER (2007)

Directed by Marcus Nispel
Written by Laeta Kalogridis and Nils Gaup
Starring Karl Urban, Moon Bloodgood, Russell Means and Clancy Brown

A young Viking boy is left all alone after all the others on the ship he was on die sometime after reaching the shores of North America. He is soon found by a Native American woman and brought back to the village where they decide to raise the child as their own. Flash forward 15 years and now the boy who they called Ghost is now a young man and while he is out on a hunting trip another boat full of Vikings have arrived and soon find his village and slaughter everyone. Later when Ghost is trying to get his revenge along with some other natives from a neighboring village are captured, the Vikings force him to show them the way to the other villages so they can cleanse this world of the savages and settle down in the new land. But the Vikings never figured one of their own would betray them for the savages.

Marcus Nispel, yes the same Marcus Nispel that directed the remake to THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE returns to the big screen with this nice little period/fantasy piece. Personally I found this movie to be a much better and far more interesting film than that remake. After watching this I’ve went around reading reviews on numerous different websites and I was surprised to find that most people didn’t like this movie. Their reasons varied from site to site, such as the characters were shallow or the story was to predictable and shit like that. Now I’m not a professional film critic so I can’t really say anything that shit, nor do I really care to. I could care less about any of that because I found this to be a fun and interesting movie and that really all I care about, is if I have fun watching this. I’ll let other people worry about the little things like that if they wish to. This is not like many of the Period type films that have been released in the recent years. Most of those films had huge budgets and hundreds of actors, extras and crew members. PATHFINDER was nearly the complete opposite as this had a small budget and only a handful of actors and crew members. It was interesting listening to Marcus on the audio commentary telling about the many tricks that they had to use to make it look like the village was much bigger than it actually was. As well as the tricks with the actors and extras in a way that it looked like there were more than just a few that they actually had. PATHFINDER was pretty violent in some scenes, the only problem with that is that most of the blood was CGI which does suck. This film was released in both PG13 and Rated R so I would get the Rated R version like I got, because I’m sure all the fighting and “violence” is pretty lame in the PG13 cut of this.

The film is pretty dark in the lighting and the color palette and it might seem that some of the same shots and techniques are pretty similar to the TCM remake. That might be cause Marcus brought along Daniel Pearl, who shot both the original and the remake of TCM, as his Director of Photography on this film. Daniel always does a good job with the cinematography in my opinion and continues that streak with this film. Jonathan Elias provides a sparse score, yet I felt that it fit the film well.

Karl Urban, who you might know better as Eomer from the LORD OF THE RINGS films, gets the starring role as Ghost the grown-up Viking kid and does a decent enough job with what he had to do. Moon Bloodgood gets her first major role as Starfire, the love interest of Ghost and whom also helps with fighting off the Viking horde. We also get the wise Russell Means, who you might remember from such films as THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS and NATURAL BORN KILLERS, plays Pathfinder the elder member of the Native village and brings yet another solid performance to the screen. And last but not least we get Clancy Brown, who always seems to play great villains is the leader of the Vikings. Overall I would say that the acting in the film is pretty solid by all who are involved.

I do have one complaint and that is the use of language in this movie. Personally when it comes to period type films such as this I prefer to have the native language of whatever culture we’re watching. For instance, the Native Americans in this movie are speaking English, why? Well, I probably know why, but I would prefer to listen to the natives speaking some native dialect. The Vikings on the other hand are speaking another language, albeit a poor form of Icelandic but at least they are speaking something different.

Overall I would recommend this movie to anybody that enjoys period/fantasy films and who likes to see Clancy playing a cool villain.

8/10