The story of Kon-Tiki, the name of Heyerdahl’s raft, has been presented before—by Heyerdahl himself in an Academy Award-winning 1950 documentary. This version, then, is updated for further dramatic impact, with beautiful cinematography and a focus on the natural surroundings. But this emphasis means the focus on the men is quite slight, with the characters nothing more than clichéd tropes: the committed leader, the skeptical modernist, the thrill-seeking youngster, the kooky sailor. Certainly some shades of these personalities existed in these men, but “Kon-Tiki” suggests absolutely nothing else.
In its beginning stages, the film is an biographical retelling of Heyerdahl’s (Pål Sverre Valheim Hagen) life: his near-drowning experience as a child, his time spent in Polynesia developing his theory, his romance with his (first) wife Liv (Agnes Kittelsen), and his obsession with the idea that Polynesia, with its pineapples and its sweet potatoes, was settled by the South Americans first. (A statue that Heyerdahl sees in Polynesia that looks quite similar to the Inca sun god Viracocha, also referred to as “Kon-Tiki,” further fuels his convictions; he would later name the raft after the god.)
As Heyerdahl grew certain in his theory, he decided to recreate the 4,300-nautical mile journey from Peru to Polynesia on a wooden raft like the South Americans would have used hundreds of years ago—but no one wanted to listen. Professors and scientific publishers rejected his idea. The National Geographic Society for funding and scoffed at his idea, refusing to accompany a “man bent on suicide.” With every “no,” however, Heyerdahl just grows more dedicated, more invested—in more of a marriage with this idea than with his increasingly exasperated, concerned wife.
Only when the Peruvian government agreed to fund his expedition was Heyerdahl given more media and mainstream attention, allowing him to gather a group of fellow adventurers: engineer Herman (Anders Baasmo Christiansen); Swede Bengt (Gustaf Skarsgård), a sociologist in charge of the day-to-day management on the expedition who brought boxes and boxes of books upon the raft; navigator and artist Erik (Odd-Magnus Williamson), who spent hours playing the guitar onboard; and radio experts Knut (Tobias Santelmann) and Torstein (Jakob Oftebro), young men who served in World War II and are still somewhat traumatized from that, constantly on edge.
If those descriptions sound slight it’s because, well, they are. The relationship between Heyerdahl and Herman is focused on most—with the former a man of faith, and the latter a man of science—but the film ends in triumph, of course, so even though Thor’s explanations for his obsession are slight (“We’ll be fine … If you can’t trust Tiki, you can trust me”), we’re supposed to blindly accept them. (There’s no mention of the fact that Heyerdahl’s theory still isn’t overwhelmingly approved in the scientific community.) I honestly can’t remember what Bengt and Erik do in the film because they’re presented so marginally, and Knut and Torstein only get our attention because of their ultra-violent killing of a shark—pulling it onto the raft, stabbing it repeatedly, and cutting it open as a kind of revenge for the danger the sharks have presented during the journey. The image of their tan, weathered bodies covered in blood is startingly effective, but it doesn’t provide any further insight about who these men really were.
Visually, however, the film is beautiful, bringing to mind last year’s “Life of Pi” with evocative, lush, colorful cinematography from directors Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg. The details they present are particularly interesting: the flying fish that kept appearing on the raft each morning, the glowing jellyfish that floated under the raft, the whale shark that so captivated the men. But Petter Skavlan and Allan Scott’s script is lacking, unable to truly draw us into the group’s 100-plus-day journey. There is a definitive fear and tension that pops up every so often for their safety when storms or sharks come along—and, purely objectively, what these men accomplished is a ridiculous, impressive, and important historical feat—but the film keeps us at a distance with its shirking of explaining these men to us. We see their departure and we see their arrival, but do we see how they changed throughout? “Kon-Tiki” ostensibly shows us a journey, but only on the raft—not in the men’s heads or hearts.
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