Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #17179 in DVD
• Released on: 2007-09-24
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, PAL
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 103 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
Pathfinder is a curious, cross-genre movie with elements of horror, sword-clanging fantasy, historical fiction, and Native American mysticism. A classic story of an outsider-hero, Pathfinder is set approximately five centuries before the arrival of Columbus in the New World, a time when Vikings were claiming real estate in Greenland and eastern North America. A young Norse boy is abandoned by his disapproving, conqueror-father and adopted by an aboriginal tribe. He grows up to become Ghost (Karl Urban), almost-but-not-entirely accepted by natives, yet a fierce swordsman and defender of Indians after a terrible assault on those whom he loves best. Clancy Brown (The Shawshank Redemption) plays the fiercest of the invaders, a merciless leader who tangles with Ghost’s inherent prowess as a fighter, and engages in a psychological as well as physical struggle with him in the film’s final third, which involves a harrowing journey through an avalanche-prone mountain path. Russell Means (The Last of the Mohicans) is a typically comforting presence as the all-wise Pathfinder, leader of a tribal nation and Ghost’s supporter, while Moon Bloodgood (Eight Below) is outstanding as a love interest with nerves of steel. Marcus Nispel (who directed the 2003 remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) guides the brutal if often exhilarating action as if it were amplified history. He makes the point for a contemporary audience that Vikings were as terrifying a danger to those whom they conquered as, say, Klingons are in Star Trek--precisely by making his Vikings seem so reminiscent of Klingons. --Tom Keogh

Synopsis
Director Marcus Nispel cut his teeth on the remake of TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, and that experience has left a bloody thumbprint on this film. PATHFINDER shares the horror movie aesthetic, with its generous use of blood, jump moments, and shadow. Centuries before Christopher Columbus reached American shores, the Vikings carved a bloody path through the continent. When a shipwreck kills a boat full of Vikings and their Native American captives, the only survivor is a young blond child. Adopted by the People of the Dawn tribe, the boy grows up into a warrior. As an adult, the former Viking, now named Ghost (Karl Urban, THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING), is an important member of his tribe with only disturbing memories to tie him to the Norsemen. When another ship of Vikings destroys his village and all he knows, he vows revenge. This remake of the Norwegian film OFELAS boasts several innovative action sequences, one involving a shield used as a sled in the snow. With his work in the Lord of the Rings films, Urban has perfected his talent at swordplay, and his prowess is evident here. His character takes on the Viking invaders almost single-handedly and stalks them, picking them off one by one. This is an action-filled film that doesn’t let dialogue get in the way of the elaborate fight scenes.

Customer Reviews

Bloody and beautiful
Pathfinder is a bloody yet beautiful movie with Karl Urban's character Ghost as a strong central character. Since you can read a synopsis of the film above, I won't go into details with the storyline, but just say that it brought tears to my eyes at times and it lingers. As a Dane I was quite curious to see how my ancestors were portraied - movies do tend to go a bit overboards with the Vikings;-)but some anachronisms apart, they remind me of the local hockey supporters so I'm okay with the way they come across on screen. And the fact that they speak Icelandic, which is the closest you get to the language we Scandinavians spoke at the time, is a nice touch. I have been eagerly awaiting this movie since I first heard about it, and I haven't been disappointed. The movie was featured at the Copenhagen International Film Festival in the shorter (cinema-)version, but I like this version better.

Good Fun!
I watched this film really expecting the worst but was pleasantly surprised! It was an actioned packed adventure movie with brutal fight scenes and a mystical air to it. Having the vikings speaking Iclandic was a good touch and be assured that the way they were depicted pillaging it probably not to far from the truth. Lets not forget the Viking Raiders were not known for their diplomacy!

All in all an enjoyable film and certainly not worthy of some of the slating reviews it has received!

Viking borefare
Some pitches are completely foolproof that you couldn't screw them up if you tried. Vikings versus Native Americans is one of them, so credit where credit's due to director Marcus Nispel for turning Pathfinder into such a yawn. An incredibly loose remake of Nils Gaup's acclaimed 1987 Norwegian film relocated to America centuries before Columbus, it sees Karl Urban as the sole survivor of a previous Viking expedition who was adopted by a local tribe and now has to find out where he really belongs if he is to save them from a new group of unwanted Norse immigrants. The opening discovery of the Vikings wrecked ship is encouragingly atmospheric, but the film doesn't take long to disappoint. The script offers everything you need for a decent action film, but doesn't deliver characters you care about, and unfortunately the film is denied even a charismatic lead to fill the gaps with old-fashioned star power. Karl Urban makes for a particularly bland void at the film's center, playing his entire part like a very shy kid on his first day a school who doesn't really want to be noticed. He's matched by the anonymous villain of the piece. Clancy Brown's Viking is more a costume and a hairstyle with no room for anything else, his subtitled dialogue not adding authenticity (hardly in a priority in a film whose look is inspired by old pulp novel covers and Hells Angels movies) but making him a distant, underdeveloped adversary.

So, everything hinges on the action scenes, but here Nispel offers lots of style but little panache. Backlit swamps, desaturated shorelines and algae green tints ensure that America looks like somewhere you wouldn't want to visit let alone fight for, while the action scenes look designed to be intercut with a particularly bad Heavy Metal group singing about thunder and plunder rather than as scenes in a movie. There's far too much slo-mo, which doesn't make action scenes more exciting but just makes them slow. Not that the film allows you to ever really get into the frequent action scenes. There's little sense of a journey or even of progressing from one scene to another, just a couple of perfunctory shots to get from one scene to the next as quickly as possible, and the fights are treated in the same perfunctory manner. This monotonous pacing ensures there are no highs and that no scene ever carries any real weight or is allowed to build to a climax: they just happen. The result is a surprisingly dreary movie that just drags on, though there is at least one unintentionally hysterically funny underwater DIALOGUE scene that plays so like something out of a Mel Brooks film you almost expect Russell Means to tell Urban to "use the Schwartz." A shame, because this could and should have been a great dumb action movie rather than a long slog to the end credits.

There's a decent selection of extras - deleted scenes, featurettes, audio commentary and trailers - but they don't make the film any less dull.