I watched 300 on Tuesday night. Before the movie, in the 25 minutes of previews/commercials preceding the movie, the trailer for an upcoming film called Pathfinder played.
Remember, friends, Joe Williams of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and others widely panned 300 as a jingoistic propoganda piece, and it was a stylized depiction of historical events.
Pathfinder, on the other hand, is the story of Viking raiders in historically inaccurate headgear who come to North America to pillage the native American villiages. They leave behind a child whom the natives spare and raise. When the Vikings return some years later, the child has grown up a killing machine, and he takes the Vikings on and looks like (according to the trailer) he beats the snot out of them.
So, thematically, we have a white man raised by savages–sorry, living-in-tune-with harmony oppressed victims–who goes onto slaughter his own kind for their imperialism. Based on actual events? No, a remake of a a 1987 movie. Except that the 1987 movie had different tribes of Scandinavia as the victims. They were changed to native Americans because that’s one more easy button to push, no doubt. Fortunately, though, the new filmakers left the raiders as Vikings and didn’t go whole hog and make them time-travelling Nazis or greedy businessmen. Subtlety.
I can’t wait for the big media reviews to call this a bit of jingoism in favor of rebeling against one’s forefathers’ beliefs, violently. Since it’s not an apostate being marked for death, it’s rebellion against white bread America (well, Scandinavia, but white bread), I expect its potentially propogandaish themes will be overlooked.
Me, I probably won’t see the film to judge its individual merits, but it doesn’t look interesting enough for me. That’s a matter of individual taste, though. Throw in a couple of mutants and maybe Adam Sandler, and I’d be there.
