![]() Pearl does a fine job in catching the foreboding nature of the frozen wilderness, coloring the entire film in an ice-and-steel palette of blue-grey hues. ![]() In a nice twist, Pathfinder has Ghost and the Indians speaking English while the Vikings speak Icelandic, which makes them more guttural and enigmatic.Cinematographer Daniel C. Usually in a film about Indians, the Indian actors have to speak in a language other than English. His right-hand man is Ulfar, played by Gladiator's Ralf Moeller. Clancy Brown, still milking his Highlander persona after all these years, makes the biggest impression as Viking chieftain Gunnar. Indian activist-turned-actor Russell Means seems to be replaying his role as Chingachgook in The Last of the Mohicans, bringing gravitas to the title role of the Pathfinder, a wise old sage in search of a successor.The Indians are far more distinctly drawn than the "Dragon Men," who are essentially a faceless horde of dark, helmeted horsemen more akin to Orcs than to Tony Curtis and Kirk Douglas in The Vikings. Nathaniel Arcand's Wind in Tree is the village idiot who pals around with Ghost, while Jay Tavare's Blackwing is the jock vying for Starfire's affections. His love interest, Starfire (Moon Bloodgood, who has an even cooler name than her character), is tough yet tender. Ghost is like Tarzan, a relatively non-verbal physical force at one in the wild. As with its depiction of the clashing cultures, the characters are similarly simplistic in their realization. Alas, historical evidence paints a far more dynamic portrait of both cultures than this popcorn flick but, like 300, this is a picture painted in broad strokes with little room for pesky sociological complexities in-between the action set-pieces.The film's greatest shortcoming is character development. The Indians are depicted here as a harmonious community who, despite their wariness about their adopted white guest Ghost, are peaceful and productive. Ironically, they refer to the cultures they crush as "savages" when there is clearly no one more barbaric than themselves. Sure, they believe in honor and a valorous death but they are brutal and relentless in their quest to conquer and pillage. The Vikings, who are white, are out and out bad. Pathfinder's culture clash premise is boiled down to its most basic, primal core. Indians tale (insert your sports joke here) the original film took place in medieval Scandinavia. ![]() The story has been re-imagined as a Vikings vs. It should be noted that Pathfinder is a loose remake of Ofelas, which was nominated for the Academy Award as Best Foreign Language Film in 1988. 300 is a far superior film, but Pathfinder is an entertaining little oddity that should become a minor cult classic in time. Pathfinder makes for a fun albeit lesser companion piece to 300 in so far as both films seem to owe more to fantasy and fanboy escapism than they do to historical accuracy. It's as simple in its premise and execution as 300, another recent period movie about men in loincloths battling an overwhelming horde of ruthless invaders. When the "Dragon Men" return fifteen years later to conquer the Indians and plunder their land, Ghost stands with his adopted tribe against the ruthless invaders.That's Pathfinder in a nutshell. Although raised by the indigenous people who found him, Ghost is not truly one of them and so remains torn between two worlds. Fox's historical actioner Pathfinder, directed by Marcus Nispel, follows Ghost (Karl Urban), a Viking who was shipwrecked as a boy on the coast of America centuries before the arrival of Christopher Columbus.
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