Kon-Tiki

“Believe every­thing will be okay and it will be,” says dirty-vest sport­ing angel­ic blonde, Thor Hey­er­dahl, through a wry gri­mace. He’s address­ing a dubi­ous raft-mate as they both drift through the Pacif­ic Ocean in this dra­mat­ic retelling of the real 1947 expe­di­tion. Why is any­one sail­ing on a raft when ships exist?

This ties into anoth­er belief held by Thor: that Poly­ne­sia was pop­u­lat­ed, not from Asia as the expert con­sen­sus main­tained at the time, but from South Amer­i­ca. Being a plucky explor­er type in pos­ses­sion of a rag­tag gang of healthy Nor­we­gians, Thor decides to prove the plau­si­bil­i­ty of his the­o­ry by jour­ney­ing from Peru to Poly­ne­sia using only the mate­ri­als avail­able to the natives at the time. We’re talk­ing bal­sa wood and oth­er ancient-Inca-conveniences.

The raft – like the 1951 doc­u­men­tary, and like this very film by direc­tors Joachim Røn­ning and Espen Sand­berg – was called Kon-Tiki, named after the Inca sun god. With Pål Sverre Hagen play­ing the Nordic adven­tur­er and ethno­g­ra­ph­er, the film has a glit­ter­ing star. Looks place him as the genet­ic com­bi­na­tion of Aiden Gillen and Ryan Gosling which is apt as Hagen is appar­ent­ly Norway’s answer to The Goz. He has the steady and appeal­ing com­po­sure of a man wed­ded to dreams in a way that real­i­ty can’t shake. Inten­si­ty puls­es gen­tly in ear­ly, estab­lish­ing scenes of Hagen liv­ing and work­ing in Poly­ne­sia look­ing gold­en and intre­pid with equal­ly gold­en and intre­pid love inter­est, Liv (Agnes Kit­tel­son) and fierce­ly as he gets grub­by and ques­tioned dur­ing 101 days on a raft.

Kon-Tiki is a film that takes a while to set sail. For­ma­tive Poly­ne­sian life is replaced by Thor get­ting laughed out of the Nation­al Geo­graph­ic office and any­where else he choos­es to pitch his raft scheme. There’s plen­ty of for­lorn mooching before his crew grad­u­al­ly takes shape. The ​‘gut­sy gang of eccentrics with noth­ing to lose’ trope is played with a hes­i­tance that makes you won­der why it was used at all. The appeal of this type of buc­ca­neer­ing stranger-than-fic­tion adven­ture sto­ry is adren­a­line and con­vic­tion. Røn­ning and Sand­berg take pains to ensure that bio­graph­i­cal facts are a big part of this film, mak­ing sure to include phone calls between Thor and his now-wife Liv that expose the ten­sions his expe­di­tion is caus­ing. For a dra­ma set at sea, there is a lot of rope tying it to dry land.

Once they final­ly get out on the waves, the fun begins. Storms, sex­tants and plen­ty of sharks trou­ble the crew of six as they grow beards and stroll around top­less under the sun. Aside from a few polite ques­tions when things get gnarly, there’s no in-fight­ing with the source of dra­ma always com­ing from the ele­ments. There is a cer­tain gen­tle­ness to the sto­ry­telling that means that curios­i­ty val­ue nev­er turns to height­ened ten­sion. More so that being a gen­tle­man adven­ture quest sto­ry, this is about what can be achieved when you fol­low a path of your own forg­ing. It’s a charm­ing and enjoy­able mes­sage in a charm­ing and enjoy­able tale. But per­haps there should have been tougher edges to this dra­ma about a 5,000 mile raft jour­ney across the Pacif­ic Ocean.