Kon-Tiki (2012)

[Frayed Knot]

A bunch of blond guys head down to Peru in 1947 to do some rafting.

[Edgy MD]

My wife has been re-reading Thor Heyerdahll, recalling what he meant to the Calfiornia mythos she grew up in. I found it koo-koo.

Sometimes, I think about "After the Gold Rush" and "Come Sail Away" and Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Parliament Funkadelic and Battlestar Gallactica and the Muslim-in-name-only theology of Louis Farrakhan and I wonder out loud, "What was it about the seventies that we were all supposed to be saved by spacemen, coming to bring a space-age rapture and take chosen ones to an idyllic new home?"

And she nods and says, "Thor Heyerdahl.'

[Frayed Knot]

Yes, this is, of course, about the Norwegian explorer/scientist Thor Heyerdahl and his attempt to show that the Polynesian Islands of the south pacific were settled, not as conventional wisdom dictated by Asians from the west, but by South Americans from the east. Scholars doubted that theory because those living in and around present day Peru didn't have the type of sailing boat necessary to travel the 5,000 or so miles 1,500 years earlier. Heyerdahl countered that they did have rafts, and that rafts could float even if they lacked the technology to steer them to much of an extent, and that those people knew the winds and the prevailing currents could have taken them that way.

So how does one 'prove' such a theory? Why you attempt to duplicate it naturally.
So off he went right after WWII with a crew of five other Nordics to build a copy of a raft that would have been known to the south Americans at the time using only materials that would have been available to them (balsa wood logs; twine but no cables; bones but no nails) and either get there or die trying.


Movie does a decent job of portraying Heyerdahl as a mixture of serious scholar and wild dreamer (yeah, he's a bit out there at times) whose vision endangers both his marriage and the lives of him and his crew. Aside from that it's a pretty straight-forward tale of him trying to raise money and buck conventional thought at the time. And then of course there's the trip itself.
Great looking film if nothing else.

[Vic Sage]

I'm sure it was a great adventure, and possibly a good movie, but his theory is still believed to be incorrect by most of the contemporary anthropological community. So he didn't really prove anything other than that he was able to make the journey and survive.

[Frayed Knot]

Yeah, I was wondering if the inevitable sign-off scenes where the audience is told what became of the crew in the years after the voyage would mention that the success of the trip hardly settled the debate on the topic. It didn't.
To its credit it also didn't claim the journey as proof of Heyerdahl's theory even if it tacitly implied it and did manage to credit the trip with spurning a new era of exploration as demonstrated by everything from the Everest expedition right around the corner and up to the space era, something which is probably at least as arguable as the lag in exploration was probably more due to the two world wars over the previous two decades than from some era of indifference just waiting for a spark.

One thing that was interesting about the movie is that it was shot with an entirely Norwegian cast (at least the leads) but with large portions of it shot twice with the bilingual actors doing one take in Norwegian and one in English in order to be able to release the same movie in different markets and different languages without either subtitles or dubbing.

[Guest cooby]

I think I read this once too.

[Guest themetfairy]

I know I read parts of it in 6th grade, and that it was boring as Hell.

[Edgy MD]

A crew without experienced sailors, without carpenters, without even any experienced fisherman. But they had no shortage of semi-crackpot wannabe anthropologists, and that ain't nothin'.

What Hyerdahl's crew did have in common is that most of them (if I remember well) were in the vanguard of the Nazi resistance in occupied Scandanavia, and so were morally gutsy and able to improvise under survival-situation pressure.