"Pathfinder"

When I first watched the previews for Pathfinder, I thought that it would probably turn out to be a good movie, and like many times in the past, I made the ultimate mistake of some what listening to the idiot “professional” critics. So it goes without saying that I did not get out to see the movie in the theater. This is the main reason I started my web site. About 90% of the time the big time critics get it wrong, and this is just another good example.

I’m not trying saying that this movie was some Oscar winning epic by any means, but it did have its good points, and was worth watching.

Pathfinder is the tale of blood lusting Vikings as they peruse, and conquer new lands, and kill any inhabitants in their way. While on a particular pillage of an Indian territory, a Viking father becomes enraged when his son will not kill as he commands. The son is abandoned to his own fate, and ends up being raised by the Indians. Ghost (played by Karl Urban) is not completely accepted by the tribe, but he is allowed to go his own direction, and as he grows older, wiser, and more experienced both as a man, and a warrior, they eventually respect him for what he has become.

Eventually the Vikings return to the same lands to reclaim it and destroy its occupants, only to find a resistance lead by Ghost. There are blood and gut scenes that rival any gore movie out there, and yet there are also beautiful landscaped, and picturesque scenes, and some well placed acting between the actors throughout the whole movie. Eventually the invading Vikings find out who Ghost is, and force him to show them where the Indians have hidden, and then it is up to Ghost to find a way to kill the Vikings and their leader before they actually catch up with the rest of the tribe.

The Vikings in this movie could not have been done any better then they were. All of them were huge, menacing, and dressed to the teeth with great costumes. Any time one of them would walk onto a scene with any of the other actors it seemed like David and Goliath, even if in real life they were not much bigger. The way the director Marcus Nispel shot some of the battles scenes just gave you this awesome sense of “scale” with regards to this.

Karl Urban has played some fantastic roles in his young career, and so far I have like most of them. I can’t say that he does a bad job with this particular role, it just seemed to me that he was the wrong actor for the part. I don’t really think he is quite ready for playing the lead in this kind of a movie. Personally I would have gone a different direction with the casting in this film, but again, I’m not putting the acting, or the story down in anyway. Marcus Nispel is trying to find his way in the directing arena, and Pathfinder was a step in the right direction. I think with this film, he has paved the way to better directing jobs.

My rating for this movie is 7.00 out of 10.00