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Pathfinder is a film based on a rather beautiful graphic novel. The story is set hundreds of years before Columbus found his way to North America, and it involves epic battles between Vikings and Native Americans.
To be specific, Pathfinder concerns beheadings, stabbings, runnings-through and other impalements, head bashing, limb removal and thousands of gallons of spurting blood. And that's not all! There's even a bit of a story to go along with it.
The Vikings come to the new world. They kill a lot of Natives. They leave behind a scared Norse boy, who wanted no part of the killing and looting.
The natives find the boy and raise him in their ways. Fifteen years go by. The boy grows into an adult (Karl Urban). He is called Ghost. The Native's mystical pathfinder (Russell Means) has his eye on Ghost; Ghost, meanwhile, has his eye on the pathfinder's beautiful daughter (Moon Bloodgood).
Those bad Vikings come back! Ghost is ready to fight to the death to defend those who raised him with love and peace. Circumstances pit Ghost, a Native named Jester (Kevin Loring), the pathfinder and the pathfinder's daughter against hundreds of the bloodthirsty Vikings.
Visually, Pathfinder has a blue/sepia smokey thing going on throughout, sort of like the cheap version of the stylized visuals you see in the movie 300.
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The film seems to have left out any sort of philosophical element based on the shaman qualities of a pathfinder. Ghost's own search for identity also gets short shrift. Instead, the emphasis is on gruesome violence, and even when Ghost shows his superior thinking and battle strategy, the end result is always more carnage.
Between the murky visuals and the gore, a viewer can expect to spend a lot of time squinting and flinching in the dark. It's not our idea of a good time, but we'll bet that plenty of adolescent boys will be doing their best to look 18 years old this weekend.
(This film is rated 18-A)