Pathfinder

When I saw the trailers for this I thought it looked awesome. Main character is a Viking, played by Karl Urban, who was left for dead, raised by Native Americans and later fights off more Vikings who come back for more destruction. You'll probably recognize Karl Urban from a number of films he's been in like Lord of the Rings or Bourne Supremecy. If you're truly a movie watcher you might even remember him from Ghost Ship. The guy's been around. He hasn't really had a starring role yet, to my knowledge, so this was definitely a step up the career ladder for him. In the same way horror movies resort to gore and/or sex to keep people interested, this movie just resulted to gore to keep the audience entertained. It wasn't very realistic gore, but it was still gore nonetheless. Besides crazy things like a man's eye being cut out and falling to the ground like a bouncy ball, there were also many other aspects of the movie that just didn't make sense. It made me think of when Chris Rock hosted the Oscars and announced if you're going to do an action movie you need to hold out for Russell Crowe and not settle for Colin Farrell. The Indians (Native Americans) seemed so naive and totally unaware. They weren't the only people living in that area and I seem to remember from history that not all native tribes and people groups were exactly friendly so people knew how to take care of themselves. Also the Vikings were just a bit too over-the-top for me. You couldn't tell who was playing who, they had somewhat superhuman strength and were basically organic helicopter gunships minus the flying ability. Were Vikings that violent? What really is the purpose of decimating a region? If you destroy everything there's not much plunder to take home. I also found it interesting that people were wearing the equivalent of bathing suits in the mountains during winter without being affected by the temperatures. Ok, ok. I'll get off my high-horse of history, continuity and logic...but what about the cinematography? This was definitely shot as an action film but it didn't have the finesse and grace of a car chase from Ronin or a crazy, out of control fight scene from the Bourne trilogy. The lighting was bad and it was hard to tell what you were looking at half the time. I know, I know, I'm exhibiting High Fidelity elite-ism. I'm ok with that. Maybe you loved this movie. That's ok. Different strokes for different folks as they say. I just know I don't want to see this again.