Pathfinder
Yes, I know. I did it again, didn’t I? Mind you, this one I watched on the recommendation of a friend and I was stuck in a Ramada Hotel in Norwich, so I had to pass the time somehow. This film is basically, Red Indians… er, I mean Native Americans versus Vikings. Really, in a nutshell, that’s it.
The story goes thus. A squaw finds a young Viking boy, the sole survivor of a longship wreck. Fifteen years later, the boy has grown into hunky, muscular Karl Wotsit who is feeling a bit of an outcast, what with him being not exactly Viking and not exactly Native American. His adoptive dad goes around saying noble things very, very slowly and says that he’s the tribe’s Pathfinder and one day soon they’ll need a new one, but Karl can’t do it cos he “hasn’t found his heart” or some such tripe. Then, a bunch of Vikings appear, including Karl’s old daddy who it turns out (in flashback) chucked young Karl out on account of his soft ways (mostly a reluctance to murder Native American children by smashing their heads open with an axe.)
Anyway, now the Vikings start giving the Native Americans what for. They slaughter nearly all of Karl’s village while he’s out hunting and boy is he mad when he gets back! The Vikings by the way are really horrible. They look like something out of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre&rd quo; and can’t seem to do anything but kill and grunt and kill and grunt some more. They wear big horned helmets (which of course they never did in real life) mostly made out of skulls and they have people's thumbs made into decorative necklaces and they seem to laugh like Brian Blessed whenever a limb gets hacked off, which in this film is every few minutes or so.
Anyway, Karl and his squaw and a guy who appears to be a bit simple, because he likes playing the flute and sniggering (not at the same time, obviously) start retaliating and by golly, do they do some damage! They kill like scores of Vikings in a series of ever more inventive ways but the weird thing is that no matter how many they despatch to Valhalla, there never seem to be any less of them, but hey maybe that’s a traditional Viking thing. Maybe they can regenerate, what do I know? I did the French Revolution at school, I was sick the week we did the Vikings.
Anyway, then the Vikings kill the simple guy, (which I can’t really blame them for, he was getting annoying) they capture Karl and say they’ll torture his squaw if he doesn’t lead them to the next village, which is somewhere over the mountains. I’m not sure why they’re so keen to go there. It’s not like the Native Americans have any treasure or anything. Just beads and shit. But anyway, Karl leads them through the snow and over the mountain, but he has a daring plan up his buckskin sleeve and the good news is the Vikings are so irredeemably thick, it doesn’t seem to occur to them that he might have an ulterior motive…
A word about the cinematography. It’s beautiful, it really is. You could take any random frame out of this film and pin it on your wall and it would look stunning. Even the decapitations look fabulous. But a bunch of still images don’t make a successful film and Pathfinder is just too thick-eared and dumb for its own good. I mean, I wasn’t expecting sensitivity in this, but it makes Conan the Barbarian look poignant by comparison and it does seem to go on a lot longer than its scant storyline merits – about an hour longer by my reckoning.
Anyway, that’s Pathfinder for you. Beautiful but crap. If there are any deaf, sensitive bodybuilders out there, this one could be just what you’re looking for.
