THE NAVIGATOR -- a Mediaeval Odyssey
A film review by Julianne Cripps Clark
Copyright 1989 Julianne Cripps Clark
This Australian and New Zealand movie left me feeling hot and cold because the director -- Vincent Ward -- has illustrated all my pet theories about Man being his own religion in the most brilliant story that I have seen for a long time. It starts off in a mediaeval Cumbrian copper mining village in the snow of March 1348 when two thirds of Europe was busy being wiped out by the Bubonic Plague.
THE NAVIGATOR works on several levels -- as an adventure story but mainly as a spiritual fulfillment for the protagonists and not least for the audience. It illustrated (to me at least!) that it's not the religion itself that counts -- but rather the power that humans have with their positive belief (be it in themselves, God, Christ, Allah ...) that constitutes Spiritual Reality. In this movie the Spirituality of the people of an age passed controlling their own destiny is contrasted with our own spiritual-less and consequently doomed age. Yes -- it *is* heavy stuff!
All else I can say without spoiling the movie for those of you who are in to this sort of thing and lucky enough to be able to see it is: be prepared to suspend your disbelief fairly early on in the picture so that it won't get in the way of the philosophy, just trust that all will "be revealed"!
[Several spoiler paragraphs removed here.]
The plot is extremely well-connected although some 20th Century sequences were a tad Indiana-Jonesish and drawn out for my taste. This may bother some people (who may have found it unbelievable that the 20th Century made it into the movie at all) to the point that they might miss the underlying philosophies. Not all the acting is brilliant. However at the very least there is some pretty black humour in the juxtaposition of the 20th and 14th Centuries (witness the tragic parting of one member of the party because he cannot make it across the busy freeway).
A brilliant movie (6 AFI Awards -- Best Picture, Director etc....).
Julianne Cripps Clark
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews