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The action-adventure movie Pathfinder unfolds in pre-Columbus America when Viking “dragon ships” mysteriously came out of the mist to invade Native American villages for slaves. A lone survivor in an invasion, a white-skinned blond 10-year-old boy, emerges from the bloodied shipwreck, suspicious and shaking with fright but with self-preservation instinct intact. He is found by a native American Indian woman, a member of the local Wampanoag tribe, who brings him home and pleads with the village elders to keep him as a real member of the community. The council of elders fears that the “different” human being who has strayed into their village would be tailed by evil wherever he goes but the Pathfinder (Russell Means), the community’s powerful shaman, perceives the young boy’s destiny among the native’s and prevails upon the community to adopt the boy. He is thus welcomed, named “Ghost” because of his white skin, and raised as one of them. Fifteen years later, Ghost (Karl Urban), still fired by anger and revenge, is a skilled hunter and warrior, ready to wage a one-man war against the Vikings in order to protect the people who have nursed and nurtured him to adulthood.
While a great deal of research went into the making of Pathfinder, it is a story set in a time that is beyond historical reach, a fact that allowed the movie’s production team (director Marcus Nispel, cinematographer Daniel C. Pearl,, costume designer Renée April, production designer Greg Blair) unlimited creative freedom in piecing together a mythical culture from the shards of fact, fiction and legend. The sets, costumes, cinematography, and other technical details are a marriage of reality and imagination, deliberately departing from stereotypes---of Vikings wearing horned helmets and American Indians living in teepees, for example---while remaining faithful to and respectful of history and culture. Commendable, too, is Pathfinder’s minimal use of CGI, compelling the actors to do their own stunts under harrowing conditions---if the script calls for “eighty people falling off a snow-covered cliff,” the movie refuses to cheat you with digitalized images but gives you exactly 80 people falling off a snow-covered cliff.
Pathfinder is not simply about the triumph of good over evil; it is more about the triumph of wisdom over ignorance. The hero, Ghost, suffers from being somewhere in between being Viking and being Indian, but realizes that to prove his loyalty and his worth to both himself and his foster people he has to confront the demons of his past which actually make up the greater demon within him. He is consumed by rage and revenge for what he sees to be his enemy---the savages who deprived him of his family as a boy and who have returned to rob him again of his new people---but through the guidance of the Pathfinder, the shaman who shows others the way, Ghost learns that only by masterfully controlling his emotions can he succeed in dealing with the enemy’s brute force.
(Date Reviewed: 16 March 2007)
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