Review XL - Kon-Tiki

Review XL
Kon-Tiki (2012)

I really wanted to watch Joachim Rønning's and Espen Sandberg's Kon-Tiki, but I kept seeing comments that there were no English subtitles readily available. My advice is to never listen to the masses because I soon saw a comment on a pirate bay torrent (don't worry, it will be linked) that provided English subtitles. As I speak both French and English, I'm going to assume that, since these scenes were subtitled correctly, the Norwegian parts were also accurate. The film stars Pål Sverre Valheim Hagen, Agnes Kittelsen, Anders Baasmo Christiansen, Gustaf Skarsgård, Odd Magnus Williamson, Tobias Santelmann, and Jakob Oftebro, and is based on the true events of the Kon-Tiki expedition of Thor Heyerdahl. Let's dive in! (I love puns.)

Thor Heyerdahl (Pål Sverre Valheim Hagen) spent years with the Polynesian with his wife, Liv (Agnes Kittelsen) studying their culture. After hearing an older man explain that everything came from the "east", Thor Heyerdahl proposes a theory that South Americans sailed to Polynesia by boat and populated the area. However, no one believes his theory. Thor Heyerdahl decides to prove his theory to be correct by building a similar raft to what the South Americans would have used in Pre-Columbian times in order to get to Polynesia. Together with Herman Watzinger (Anders Baasmo Christiansen), a refrigerator engineer, Bengt Danielsson (Gustaf Skarsgård), the Swedish ethnographer and "cameraman", Erik Hesselberg (Odd Magnus Williamson), Torstein Raaby (Jakob Oftebro), and Knut Haugland (Tobias Santelmann), who are all war friends of Thor Heyerdahl, the group set out into the Pacific to change the course of science.

I love watching all these films because I'm definitely getting more informed about historical events, even if they are dramatised. I'm going to go ahead and say that I thought the film was beautifully filmed. I was really glad I got to see a good quality version because the way the film is captured is just pretty. The animals that are encountered are really interesting, and it doesn't feel as fake as, well, how Life of Pi depicts it. While Life of Pi did do a wonderful job, I liked this film because everything didn't feel as CGI-ish to me. Maybe it's because I didn't see it on the big screen, but I'm going to remain sceptical about that. Anyway, it was beautifully filmed, so even if the story were boring, at least there was eye candy attached to it.

That being said, I didn't think it was boring. It was an interesting plot (history is often very interesting), though it could have been much better. For example, I thought there would have been more hardships in relation to people's emotions on the boat, and while they did exist, they didn't seem as frequent. Without giving anything away, it just seems like sometimes the group should have been more tense but wasn't. Afterall, this is a dramatisation of the real expedition, and I'm sure there was a bit more drama in relation to the problem the crew faces. Maybe I just expect too much emotional outbursts from people... The story also tried to add in the bit about Liv, his wife, and while I'm glad they included it, I'm not sure they should have included it the way they did. I'm finding it hard to criticise this since it seems necessary, but it just doesn't seem like it was done to the best of the film's abilities. Otherwise, the story itself was good. I enjoyed it, and I definitely would like to check out the documentary that Thor Heyerdahl released in relation to the expedition.

I enjoyed the film, though I do believe there could have been improvement in it. I'd give the film seven point eight stars on ten. It was enjoyable to watch, but it could definitely have been much better than it was.

Pirate Bay torrent (with English subtitles, as found in a comment on that torrent, here)