Kon-Tiki is based on a real life story of an adventurer with a wild theory about who originally immigrated to Polynesia, and in order to obtain credibility, he decides to replicate his theory by sailing the Pacific in a raft. I knew very little about the Kon-Tiki expedition, and I love stories about things that I would never do.
Kon-Tiki is a really beautiful film to watch with the exception of city scapes, which felt a tad blue screeny. Even though the events occur in 1947, and the outcome is known, there is a sense of urgency and uncertainty that makes it feel like it is happening now. There is also an implicit tone that post WWII, this sense of adventure was a way of rejecting known civilization in response to its extended failure to resist evil.
Unfortunately Kon-Tiki falls into character tropes and fails to fully explore the characters on the raft. Because of the tropes, a good editor should have jumped in and cut a half hour to maintain a less deliberate pace. Gustaf Skarsgård has a real knack for unusual and memorable characters, but his character is a small one, and he isn’t given as much to do as I would have liked. I wish that I had seen the version that was filmed in Norwegian with subtitles instead of English-Kon-Tiki was filmed in both languages simultaneously, but I didn’t know that a Norwegian version existed until I finished the movie.
What also took away from the viewing experience after watching Kon-Tiki was discovering that the basis for his wacky theory was that primitive cultures could not have evolved without the help of red haired white people. So the post WWII ennui and desire for community with the Polynesians was a bit of revisionist history to make the explorers more palatable for modern viewers. There is a book and documentary by the actual explorers so at some point, I will need to check them out. The dramatized version of Kon-Tiki is a good movie, but not a must see.