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The story of the raft Kon Tiki and its crew are legendary.

Legends of the natives of the South Pacific that told how people "from the East" settled in the islands.

This, in spite of the experts that a raft without power of any kind could not float westward into the sun. Thor Heyerdahl an amateur explorer decided to try the legend out. No one accepted his theories on paper so he tried the thing out for real.

The result was the voyage of the raft that he built from Peru to the South Pacific. Against "all" odds.

I read this book when I was 10-ish.

Well, the book probably came out a bit later. He did have to write it.

This is a time when the idea of new discoveries had been crushed by war and the possibilities of finding new things in the world were considered unlikely.

The achievement of these men became "legendary" in its own time and inspired many more such adventures not only on the earth but in space.

Or that is what it says here in fine print.

For my money it is enough that these guys did the trick, proved the "experts" wrong and exhibited enormous courage in the act of doing rather than theorizing.

There was a documentary which I also saw and it won an Academy Award. I saw it long ago.

Now, this film

Kon Tiki (2012)

all dolled up in story lines, fancy music and inspiring thoughts none of which help the story along but reduce the whole thing to a thumping cliché and series of formulaic "scenes" concocted to keep our attention.

The first half hour is all buildup to the "impossibility" of Heyerdahl's project, the rejections from foundations of all kind, the pleas of his wife not to undertake the dangerous expedition and a childhood pre-story which smells of fabrication.

The second hour is mostly time on the ocean with the various experiences seemingly pasted together with scissors and a glue pot. Serially shown, dramatically composed and, while well acted, a bit too much caricature in the personnel and their reaction to the voyage and each other.

Nonetheless, the time on the sea is a vast improvement over the ploddy time on the land. Sharks? Yes. A big big whale, yes. A cowardly crewmember who finds himself? Sure. And so on.

It would have helped to mix it up a bit and challenge us by showing several story lines in parallel like real life and in better realized movies. But no. Line by line, scene by scene, they are going to show us the pieces rather than the whole.

And through it all the score, my god, the score. Swelling music and little tunes as though the natural events are not enough. The sea is silent godammit. Let it alone.

There is even a protracted scene in which we rise up above the raft vertically and it gets smaller and smaller and, soon, not soon enough, the viewpoint shifts to the parallel and we are in the clouds, then the earth and finally, thank god, the universe. Milky way.

I did not FF. But I could have and seen the scenes flip by one by one as in a flip page movie.

Sorry to spoil it if you are, as I did, looking forward to it.

A bitter lover spurned.

But I am not deterred from my admiration of this crew. We are given their history after the voyage and they contributed considerably to other explorations on the sea and land.

For his part, Heyerdahl made a lot of money on this book. Good.

It is funny that the only thing they left out was a tearful reunion with a contrite wife but we were spared that. Maybe she left his ass and went to have a happy life with the kids in the country.

I will give this a 2 out of Netflix5. No FF but no skipping gives it that. It was a disappointing film and not at all up to the book or documentary of the same name.

Irony of fate. The film is unaccountably produced in English when everyone was Scandinavian. For revenge, here is the trailer in the home language of the voyagers.

Once again, I am amused that I write longer reviews of movies that I do not like much.

Labels: films