Kon-Tiki (2012)

Kon-Tiki arrives as a sturdy piece of Scandinavian craftsmanship, a 2012 dramatization of Thor Heyerdahl's 1947 balsa raft crossing, and it conducts itself with the brisk efficiency of a vessel that knows exactly where it is going. Six men, one macaw, four thousand three hundred nautical miles of open Pacific, sharks, storms, and a hemp-rope crisis engineered for the second act. The production was shot twice, once in Norwegian and once in English, which tells you most of what you need to know about its priorities. It wants to entertain two audiences, and it does. What it does not want is to argue.

The casting is uniformly Nordic, and the scenes set on Fatu Hiva were filmed in Thailand with Thai performers standing in for Polynesians, holding spears and weaving baskets that belong to neither place. The film also declines to mention Heyerdahl's own speculations about tall white bearded voyagers carrying civilization westward, a selective silence, though not one deployed in service of any modern racial argument. It is simply a gap. Agnes Kittelsen's Liv waits at home, estranged and patient, and the narrative has no further use for her.

The remaining categories go unfilled with a consistency that borders on the austere. No climate sermon, no class grievance, no body-image discourse, no neurodivergent subplot, no queer subtext, nothing that could be mistaken for a lecture. The invented material, a tearful Watzinger, a shark-fed parrot, a maelstrom lifted wholesale from Poe, is dramatic license and nothing more. This is a film about a raft. It stays a film about a raft.