The Color of Film Collaborative

Best Foreign Language Film nominee at the 85th Academy Awards and 70th Golden Globe Awards is the historical dramatic film “Kon-Tiki.” This film is reincarnated on the big screen more than fifty years after the 1947 Kon-Tiki expedition and the release of a documentary feature of the same subject years later. Directors Joachim Ronning and Espen Sandberg stretch the bounds of modern film making by tricking audiences into believing that they were apart of the ambitious scientific voyage from Peru to Polynesia (an impressive distance of 4,300 nautical miles.) Disregarding the advice of many, the directors made the blatantly irrational decision of filming “Kon-Tiki” on the open ocean. Irrational and fraught with liability maybe, but the film is all the better for it and drenches every scene with realism from the rafts send off in Peru, captained by Thor Heyerdahl (Pål Sverre Valheim Hagen), to its eventual docking in Polynesia more than three months later.

Unsatisfied with the prevailing theories of the time that Polynesia had been settled by peoples migrating from the west, ethnographer and adventurer Thor Heyerdahl set out to prove his own theory of migration; that Peruvians were in fact the first to inhabit Polynesia. Thought by many to have been an extremist in regards to his beliefs, Heyerdahl built a wooden raft constructed of balsa-wood using the same techniques that would have been utilized thousands of years before. His objective: to drift to Polynesia using the oceans currents. Deemed as mad, scholars were unfaithful in Thor’s excursion. Viewers that are new to the expedition of 1947 struggle to choose whose side their on as send off day approaches; that of the faithful adventurer, or that of an onlooker who believes it is a suicide mission.

The atmosphere of the film is comfortable, until the crew of the Kon-Tiki sit motionless in the middle of the ocean. A feeling of isolation emerges from the set, putting the crew members and audience members in a state of unease. In its entirety “Kon-Tiki” is a fun journey that captures, to the best of its ability, the struggles and triumphs of being in a similar situation. It brings to light one mans goal to prove that new lands had not only been discovered by European explorers, but by the indigenous people that once lived there many years ago. It is as much of a historical film as it is an incredibly entertaining one.