Kon Tiki (Joachim Rønning, Espen Sandberg, 2012) Phuket Thailand

Reviewed by Tobias Luvenberg. Viewed at Santa Barbara Film Festival.

The movie starts to show a young boy that is fearless, he doesn’t care if the people around him says it is dangerous. The fearless boy was named Thor, at a young age Thor wanted to have adventure, he also were they guy who never gave up on things even if people didn’t believed in him. Thor grew up and traveled to south America to an island named Polynesia to study the people there. The year were going and he learned more about the people, he learned that Tiki wasn’t from east he came from the west. Thor start to dig deeper in the history and had proof that Tiki didn’t sail from the east or was from Asia. Ten years had going and Thor went to New York with his book that he had wrote on the island, a book that had been written by Thor but the words from the people in Polynesia. He tries to sell the book all over New York but no one believes in Thor’s story, so Thor start his own project to proof that Tiki sailed from the west and that he followed the water stream.

Thor tried to get his own crew, he talks with people that has been on sail for many years, he tries to get people that has experience on the sea. But everyone of them tells him that he is crazy and no one can survive a trip on a raft on the deep sea of Atlantic, but there was a guy, a fridge seller (Herman Watzinger) that believed in Thor and his stories. Thor and Herman decided to start the journey on there own, but before that Thor gather his old friends from Norway (Erik Hesselberg, Knut Haugland, Torstein Raaby). There is also a Swedish photographer that joined the journey.

The fact that the gods probably do not cross the sea on a raft, and that one should not necessarily trust everything that the old men in the Jungle says, was fortunately nothing preventing Thor Heyerdahl. And even though the odds are constantly against them and many – the press, potential founders and the aforementioned wife – condemns the group as soon as the dead men, there is a contagious spark within Heyerdahl and a strong faith who also came to make him historic.