Kon-Tiki (2012)

  I found this movie to be a weird artifact.  Who was clamoring for a dramatic recreation of a documentary from 1951 involving a now disproved Norwegian anthropologist's theory on the origin of the indigenous peoples of Polynesia?  What audience was this intended for, precisely?

Thor Heyerdahl (Pal Sverre Hagen) has spent his life in the South Pacific islands, blithely recording folktales and customs when he reads about how pineapples plentiful in the islands are actually native to South America.  He theorizes that if plants migrated on the westward currents, people could have done the same, upending the prevailing scientific consensus that Polynesia was originally settled by people of Asian descent moving east (which was later proven to be true).  Desperate for funding to prove his theory, Thor travels to America and meets struggling refrigerator salesman and engineer, Herman Watzinger (Anders Baasmo Christiansen), who offers to help construct the raft that will carry the six-man crew over 5000 miles of ocean.  Thor gets his best friend, Erik (Odd-Magnus Williamson), two military veterans (Tobias Santelmann and Jakob Oftebro), and a Swedish cameraman (Gustaf Skarsgaard) to join him on his quest. 

The original Kon-Tiki is almost 80-years-old at this point, so I'm not sure how prevalent it is in the current zeitgeist.  Maybe that's why this new adaptation tries to aggressively spoon-feed the facts to the audience instead of trusting that they will understand the cultural and scientific underpinnings.  Having watched the original fairly recently for a college film class, I felt it was very heavy-handed. 

Also, I wasn't super enthused about how much of a zealot Heyerdahl is painted.  He never once wavers from his belief in his theory, despite exhortations and almost a mutiny by his crew, dangers he couldn't anticipate, and the ever present knowledge that should anything go wrong, he has condemned five other men to death.

The film is shot and edited very well, and the VFX of the marine life are impeccable.  There was clearly an effort made to conform to certain scenes from the documentary and a very nice little postscript detailing their lives after the voyage and some of the lasting legacies they've had but the viewing overall left me cold.