Sometimes a movie comes along with a premise so promising, it causes you to uncontrollably salivate like Giger’s Alien at the prospect of experiencing it. One such example was Pathfinder, a flick that came with a concept so simple and yet so unvearably cool sounding, I simply couldn’t wait to expose my eyeballs to the potential genius that was possibly about to unfold. I mean, come on – Natives vs Norsemen? What’s not to get excited about?
It seems quite a bit, as Marcus Nispel’s stylistic overload drew snorts of derision when it was released and I decided to skip the film in the face of overwhelmingly bad reviews; but years later I decided to give the film a chance and see if Nispel’s visual acumen managed to override all the other issues and deliver the braves/bezerker beat down I was hoping for all along.
Let’s just say it looked pretty, if nothing else…
After being discovered in the wreckage of a Viking longboat in North America, a young child is adopted by a woman of a local tribe of Native Americans and is accepted after being named “Ghost” for the paleness of his skin. Since ancient tribes had no word for “Human Resources”, Ghost let’s this slide and grows to be a strong member of the tribe, but due to his mysterious heritage, never feels he truly belongs despite having obvious feelings for Starfire, the daughter of the Pathfinder, the wise leader of a neighbouring tribe. However, if Ghost is having conflicting feelings now, then he’s about to have quite the sizable reality check when hulking, Viking marauders arrive on their shores with the aim of creating a settlement after they’ve murdered everyone in the surrounding area.
They get off to a horrifying start by slaughtering Ghost’s entire tribe and under the cruel leadership of the fearsome Gunnar, it looks like the Viking’s superior armour and weapons will make short work of anyone who stands in their way. This is Ghost’s cue to finally choose between his two people – although, to be fair, choosing between a peaceful race who worship the earth and one who class stabbing people through the chest as a national past time should be fairly cut and dry. However, firmly siding with the people who raised him, we wages a war with his kinfolk to try and halt their murderous advance.
As the pitiless winter is about to give way to a perilous spring, Ghost realises he has an advantage over his enemies due to their unfamiliarity with the land and with Starfire joining to protect her people we’re treated to endless sequences of flashing swords, spurting blood and lots of slow motion shots of horses galloping as their breath expels in billowing clouds. But even with the knowledge of two races locked in his mind, can Ghost possibly hope to emerge victorious against such overwhelming odds?
When first watching Pathfinder, I was first struck by how much of Marcus Nispel’s direction was bang on the money. Hardly a stranger to masked murderers and lopped limbs thanks to the new lick of paint he gave Leatherface in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake (he also went on to give Jason Voorhees and Conan The Barbarian cinematic makeovers), he lays out an intuitive visual language that initially feels incredibly right and is pretty fucking cool to boot. For a start, almost every frame is formatted to look like a Frank Frazetta painting come to life. The Native Americans are delivered in earthy browns and are usually wreathed sitting by warm fires and lush forest while the Vikings are drenched in cold blues and are unsurprisingly led by a shaggy bearded Clancy Brown and in a remarkably cool touch, the invading northmen are padded out in so many layers of furs, armour and gnarly horned helmets, they each look at least eight feet tall and more formidable than a rampaging bull with chainsaws attached to their horns and seemingly come complete with their own personal snow flurries that follow them wherever they go. Elsewhere, to match the striking costume design, the surroundings also have that vague 300 look that gives matters an extra legendary feel, a lot of the dialogue is admirably delivered in native tongues and subtitles and there’s an understandable desire to show exactly what the damage caused by such pointy weapons looks like. But once we’ve covered these rather striking basics, Pathfinder soon begins to lose its way the second we get into the thornier aspect of the film, such as plot and charactisation.
Straight off the bat, we get steamrolled by those classic, white saviour tropes as Karl Uban’s Ghost seems to be the only one equipped to merge his Viking heritage and Native American upbringing in order to save the day and while the always likable actor certainly looks the part as he brawls with marauders nearly twice his size, it’s weird that a film that does something so mature as have the Vikings speak entirely in their own language would A) have the Natives speak English in that typical “Red Indian” accent and spout such hokey wisdom as “There are two wolves fighting in every man’s heart”, and B) not make the main hero white. It seems even stranger that Pathfinder was released a short while after Mel Gibson’s exemplary Apocalyptico, which did a similar thing far more respectfully while not compromising it’s scale or human connection – something that’s truly lacking here.
As the story rumbles on, soon no amount of cool looking shit can start to hide that Pathfinder is ultimately quite an empty film and after all the near constant sword battles, stealth takedowns and even a *checks notes* deadly sledge chase down the side of a mountain (all mostly filmed in close up) you soon start to feel crucially starved of an actual story, but all Nispel can give up in return is just more scenes of Urban dutifully whittling down Clancy’s ranks with sub-Rambo skill. Maybe things could have been salvaged with a last minute battle between the opposing forces or at least featured Braves who were at least a little bit competent (most literally die accidently by stumbling into one of Ghost’s traps), but frustratingly, the most severe blows scored in this potentially epic conflict prove to be on the audiences patience as Pathfinder hasn’t much to offer beyond the wash, rinse, repeat of endless clashes that carry no emotional weight.
It looks great, that’s true; but unfortunately Nispel’s keen eye for epic shots soon collapses which is a shame, because for brief moments you feel that the director is a whiskers breadth away from delivering a hard edged, sword swinger that flirts with both grit and legend much in the same way John Milius did with the original Conan movie. However, the only other true way you’re going to get a satisfying scrap between Vikings and Redskins is if you watched an old American Football game pre 2020.
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