OVP: Kon-Tiki (2012)

Film: Kon-Tiki (2012)
Stars: Pal Sverre Valheim Hagen, Anders Baasmo Christiansen, Gustaf Skarsgard, Odd-Magnus Williamson, Agnes Kittelsen
Director: Joachim Renning and Espen Sandberg
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Foreign Language Film-Norway)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

There are movies that you love the subject so much it's difficult to remain objective toward, even if you find that you must.  For me, this is a rare occurrence, as I rarely if ever care for true-to-life stories.  I might be more partial to an actor or director or genre, but subject matter is rarely the thing that drives me to celebrate a film or dismiss it.  That being said, there are few things that I am more mystified by than the adventurers, whether they be Amundsen or Armstrong, Hillary or Baumgartner.  And few make my heart swell more with beaming admiration than Thor Heyerdahl.

Heyerdahl's adventure is one of those ones that makes you rethink your entire life, and where you have taken it, as there are few things more daring, romantic, psychotic, and astounding than taking off in a balsa wood raft and crossing the Pacific Ocean to prove a theory that, even if you are successful, holds little water.  Indeed, while later genetic evidence has always pointed to Heyerdahl being incorrect about his hypothesis, I think it wasn't so much that he wanted to prove that he was right that Polynesia could have been founded by Peruvians, but that he could be right.

Whatever the reason, the voyage of the Kon-Tiki, along with the mounting of Everest and eventually the leaps into space taken by Gagarin, Glenn, and Armstrong, showed a new level of adventuring and the human spirit, and was to be greatly lauded.  It's sort of a wonder that a large-scale film about the Kon-Tiki similar to this has never been mastered before, and it's nice to know that it happened in the native tongue of Heyerdahl himself.

Of course, you wouldn't necessarily know this going into the film in the United States, due to the Weinstein Company's controversial decision to have the film released in English.  The movie doesn't suffer a lot from this decision, primarily because it isn't a dubbing-the film was filmed in both Norwegian and English, but it's a little weird seeing a Foreign Language Film nominee that is 90% in your native tongue (at least for an American Oscar-obsessive, it is weird).

The movie is structured fairly traditionally, with the first half being Heyerdahl (played by the ridiculously handsome Hagen-seriously, look at that picture) charming and scheming his way to become as famous as Charles Darwin, and eventually deciding upon what certainly appears to be a suicide mission-taking a raft across the world to prove a seemingly impossible theory true.  The movie assembles his motley crew, complete with a guy who has no business on this raft, a refrigerator salesman named Watzinger, who joins after listening to Thor dreamily musing about his journey one night in a bar.  This portion of the film hums, but seems to be a retread of every other adventure movie you've ever seen-the doubtful reactions, the determined main character bucking the odds.  There's a star-like quality that can't be quenched, primarily since we know what an unusual success the journey will be and because Hagen oozes charisma, but it's your routine set of scenes.

The open sea gets quite a bit stronger, and is the better half of the film.  The movie isn't afraid to make the audience petrified, and we are, though not just by the immediacy of the sharks and storms that ravage the crew, but also by the limitless ocean that surrounds them with no safety net.  The movie borrows heavily from the film Jaws (was I the only person who was positive that the score was taking a pluck from John Williams iconic ba-bump?), with the sneak attacks in the water, but it's still effective.  The first time the giant whale/shark (not 100% certain what that was) shows up, you almost scream in the theater.  It's a little less spectacular when the Great White shows up, since we're already on high alert and know it has to be coming, but the scenes still have an undeniable energy, partially drawn by how immediate the sharks are in what appears to be a relatively small raft, one that the sharks likely could turn over if they worked in tandem.

I wasn't wild about the madness elements that came out of these scenes, not because I didn't think they were a realistic idea (they were-over 100 days at sea has to be horribly monotonous, even if you're regularly struggling for your life), but because the film doesn't take enough time to address the crazy.  Watzinger, who is proven to be the doubting Thomas in the group, regularly alternates between wide-eyed idealism and complete disbelief at Heyerdahl, despite being one of the few who believed in him wholeheartedly in the beginning of the film.  There's no evolution in his character.  In fact there's rare evolution in any of the characters.  The movie would have done better to spend more of the film at sea, getting to know our six-man crew as individuals rather than one-man traits.

That being said, the film is splendid as an action film, and the visual effects, thankfully not a wall of CGI like most modern films, really add character and depth to the film, and truly add to the movie (and it's rarely clear which effects are real and which ones are fake, particularly with the sharks).  I was very taken with Hagen, not just the Jack Dawson-hair, but the sly, addictive way he approaches the camera.  There's a reason the film can't seem to stop turning to him, even in scenes where the supporting cast probably makes more sense.  Overall, a 5-for subject, but a 3-for execution, with a definite thumbs up on whether you should seek it out for yourself.