Pathfinder

6/11/2017

Historically inaccurate with characters you don't care for and a story you've seen beat-for-beat before. But somebody give this damn costume department an Academy Award **immediately**! _Final rating:★★½ - Had a lot that appealed to me, didn’t quite work as a whole._

2/6/2022

_**Great-looking action/adventure flick is dramatically weak and banal**_ Vikings come to North America hundreds of years before Columbus bringing death & destruction to the Beothuk people in what is now Newfoundland. One of the latter, Ghost (Karl Urban), is actually a Viking by blood, a survivor of a previous Viking expedition. I thought this was going to be some low-budget Syfy flick but, no, "Pathfinder" (2007) is a theatrical release with stellar production values. The first thing I noticed was that the director is Marcus Nispel, who went on to direct the 2011 version of "Conan the Barbarian." There are some glaring derivative bits sprinkled throughout, like Tarzan, "Conan the Barbarian" (1982), "Rambo 2," "Last of the Mohicans," and so forth. This isn't helped by forced line

10/6/2023

**A historian should not watch this film without a medical team nearby.** My problem with films set in the past, or about historical facts, is that my academic background in History prevents me from lightly accepting everything that the filmmakers want to make me swallow. That's why I was so harsh in the reviews I wrote about some films here, and everything indicates that, to major sadness of my heart, I will continue to have this problem. Okay, cinema must have its creative freedom, and it is also necessary to fill information gaps (we don't know everything about the past), but even creative freedom must recognize logical limits. Today, we know without a doubt that Scandinavian navigators – who have been called “Vikings” – were the first Europeans to arrive in North America. What we