I returned with four gems, which I watched in the order I suspected I would enjoy them in. They were:
Pathfinder
I first saw this for sale at Wal-Mart, and it looked so Awesomely Bad that I knew I had to see it. As you can see from the cover, that's a big ol' Viking with an axe taking on a Native American - with a sword.
This is an Awesomely Bad idea. If you aren’t familiar with this category, let me fill you in. I first heard it from VH1 (the Awesomely Bad “Music Video” channel). There are 3 categories: Awesome, Bad, and Awesomely Bad. Awesome things are what we traditionally call “Good,” as they are entertaining. Bad things are things you should avoid, as they are not entertaining. “Awesomely Bad” things are so bad that they become good, by virtue of being entertainingly bad.
Now, you might think that Native Americans vs. Vikings would be the kind of film set-up that would guarantee an Awesomely Bad rating. You would be incorrect. This movie was Bad. The idea is Awesomely Bad - the movie itself is just Bad.
It stars Karl Urban (most familiar as Eomer from Lord of the Rings) who as a child was the sole survivor of a failed Viking raid on North America, raised by Native Americans as part of the tribe, who must now defend his adopted people against the Vikings when they return in force. An Awesomely Bad set-up that fails in the execution.
It is pointless to say that the (very little) dialogue in the movie is terrible. This is a movie about Native Americans fighting Vikings. No one expects it win the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. What is important is the fighting. And therein lies the problem.
Amazingly, this movie manages to be politically correct and incorrect at the same time – the Native Americans are good-hearted and peaceful, the Vikings bloodthirsty and evil. But the Natives are also completely helpless, and Karl Urban (the sole European good guy) seems to be the only person that can do anything in a fight with a Viking besides die quickly.
About halfway through this movie, I realized the importance of setting up the landscape for an action scene. If you have no idea how big the swamp, cave, or forest is in which the fight is occurring, or the layout of of these battlefields, it is very hard to tell what in the world is going on. Also, you have to give some idea of how many enemies you are fighting. If in some scenes there appear to be thirty or so Vikings, and yet their number never seems to diminish, at some point you stop caring about how many Karl Urban has dispatched, because there's no way to tell if his odds are improving.
I will give the movie points for reaching new levels of entertainment in villain plummeting. (Hint to other heroes – when traversing a narrow mountain pass with your enemies, try to get them to tie themselves together.) If you take the climactic mountain battle scene by itself, we can declare success in achieving Awesomely Bad. For example, in a normal movie, if you knew that Vikings landed on the East Coast of the North America, but the mountains they are crossing appear to be the Canadian Rockies, you would cry “Improbable!” But in a movie like this, you see Vikings crossing the Canadian Rockies, and you think “Awesome!”
I find that I have gone on a long time about a movie I didn’t really like very much. Hmmm. I’ll come back later and tell you about the other movies I saw last week that were actually good.
Trivia: This is a remake of an Oscar-nominated 1987 film, also about Vikings and a native people, in this case the Sami of Norway. I’ll have to see if I track that one down.
P.S. Go see Gran Turino, with Clint Eastwood – it’s Awesome.
