Pathfinder

I don’t know why I subjected myself to the torture of the Ghost Warrior. I saw the trailer when it came out on the heels of 300. I heard this movie was actually completed before 300 and shelved. I guess Fox decided to release it when it saw that a sword-fighting movie could make some money. This movie didn’t make much money. Read on for a spoiler-filled fun time.

“I trust in this.”—Ghost, referring to his sword

Pathfinder: The Legend of the Ghost Warrior is directed by Marcus Nispel, the man who brought us the 2003 remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. When I got the DVD in the mail from Netflix, I discovered that the title was shortened to just Pathfinder. That probably helped a little with the DVD printing costs. I wonder if Nissan got mad that the title for this movie is derived from one of their SUV models. Regardless, the title is somewhat misleading because there aren’t too many paths being found in this movie, and the Pathfinder is not the main character. The main character is Ghost.

The movie begins with a native-American woman wandering through the woods, somewhere in Newfoundland (I think). She stumbles upon a smashed up Viking ship with a 10 year-old Viking boy hiding inside. Everyone else that was aboard the ship is dead. The movie never explains how this happened. The woman takes Viking-boy (hereafter referred to as Ghost) to her tribal leaders and a debate ensues on what to do with him. It is decided that the woman and her husband shall be the boy’s adoptive parents.

15 years later: Ghost (played by Karl Urban (Ghost Ship...I sense a theme))is now a part of the tribe. He is a nice, soft-spoken gentleman with long hair and firm pectoral muscles. He seems to get along well with his adopted people. He isn’t fully assimilated into this society, though, as we soon discover. A bunch of the warriors in the tribe (the Braves) are going to go off on some sort of proving mission and Ghost is rejected the opportunity because of his ghostness or blue eyes or something. He proclaims that he will find his own goddamned path. Side note: All the Indians in this movie speak perfect English. There isn’t much dialogue in the film (and the dialogue that is present is pretty useless) so I’m not sure why they didn’t go for realism and use subtitles. Maybe they were trying to make things easier for the viewer. But that doesn’t make sense because the Viking dialogue is spoken in Icelandic and is subtitled. They only speak in single sentences and grunt a lot. Ghost speaks both languages, so none of this is a problem for him.

So…Ghost is off on a hunt by himself. The Vikings show up and proceed to slaughter his entire village. They brutally hack up his friends, including his adoptive mother. Ghost goes running back to the village but gets there too late. He sees his dead mom. There is one of those circle fight scenes (you know, where a bunch of guys form a circle around the big tough bad guy who shows off by killing everyone that is sent against him) going on a little ways away. Ghost shows up in time to see a huge Viking kill his adoptive father. Ghost is thrown in the circle next. He grabs a sword, cuts out the Viking’s eyeball, slashes a few other dudes, and escapes. This prompts the Viking leader to opine, “This guy knows our ways” or something like that. The Vikings wear these crazy metal helmets with horns and have huge shields and axes. Their horses have metal armor, too. They mean business and their business is carnage.

The Vikings chase Ghost through a forest, where he chops one guy with a sword and “Captain America-izes” another with a shield. The pursuit continues all the way up a really high mountain. The Vikings corner him at the peak and shoot him with an arrow. Ghost grabs a shield and uses it as a sled to escape. The Vikings, who are well-schooled in tobogganing, give chase. This scene is kind of slow and really dumb (I was expecting them to sled faster like Chevy Chase in Christmas Vacation…they could have used some of his Teflon based cereal varnish). Ghost kicks a few of his pursuers off of their sleds and ends up flying off a cliff and landing in a waterfall.

Ghost hikes around for a bit and finally ends up in a cave, still wounded, where he is discovered by the Braves. He tells the Braves to get lost because the Vikings are here and they want to find the next village to destroy. There is a scene in the cave where a Grizzly Bear attacks the Pathfinder (the old guy leader of the Braves). This is the funniest scene in the movie. The footage is so choppy, dark, and poorly edited that you can’t tell what the hell is going on. This seems to be the main tool employed by the filmmakers. They processed the movie in a washed-out sepia tone…nearly no color comes through (except for instances of CGI blood splatter). The action sequences are shot in the dark and are quick-cut edited so you can’t tell who is fighting whom, who is bleeding, or who dies.

Ghost receives some much-needed medical attention from some girl he loves and her father, the Pathfinder. They perform some Indian magic and smoke a lot of herbs from a pipe. The magic works quickly and Ghost is healed. He leaves his friends and tells them to make for the coast, while he leads the Vikings in a different direction. This one flute-playing Brave insists on following him. Ghost is mad at first, then gives in to the flute-player’s charms. They make their way to a place called “the canyon where all paths converge”. This is where they will set up traps and face the Vikings. Ghost’s girlfriend shows up pretty soon…she followed him as well. He’s not very sneaky.

The Vikings show up, get caught in a lot of the traps, and a lot more fighting ensues. Things are going well for the hero Ghost until the Braves show up and fall into one of Ghost’s traps, ruining his plans. What a bunch of dumbasses. Ghost, flute-boy, girlfriend, and the remaining braves retreat to the caves. At this point in the movie I really couldn’t tell what was going on. It was too dark to see anything. One of the Vikings even says, “I can’t see anything”. I empathized with him. During the cave fight the rest of the Braves are killed, along with flute-boy and Pathfinder. Ghost and girlfriend are quickly captured and the Vikings demand them to lead the way to the next village.

The final battle of the movie takes place on an extremely narrow path along the face of a cliff. I won’t tell you what happens during this climatic scene. I will tell you that there is some pretty bad stock footage of an avalanche. The questions you should be asking yourselves are: Does Ghost kill the Vikings? Does girlfriend live? Is the next village safe? Does Ghost become the next Pathfinder? Do Ghost and girlfriend make a lot of little Pathfinder babies to carry on the Pathfinder legacy and pave the way for a sequel, Pathfinder, Jr.?

This movie was awful. I wasn't expecting it to be good. I was expecting to be entertained. I wasn't. I wouldn’t include it in the “so bad it’s funny” category of films. I would include it in the “so bad it sucks balls” category. It’s difficult to watch. It took me 4 hours to get through it. I had to keep putting it on pause to do other things like play on the computer, talk on the phone, and wander around my apartment aimlessly. I’m not sure how I finished it. Chalk one up to perseverance. I didn’t watch any of the special features because I didn’t care. I did, however, search on imdb to see how much money the movie made. It grossed barely over $10 million domestic. Some idiot reviewer said that this wasn’t a bad B-movie. Hey reviewer--this movie cost $26 million to make. That doesn’t seem like a B-movie budget to me. It seems like a waste of money.