In the years following the success of History's wildly popular 2013 historical drama "Vikings," it's been hard to find a good story about Scandinavians traveling somewhere by boat that doesn't end in bloody death and an omnipresent layer of viscera and mud.
And so we turn to 2012, just before Ragnar et al started getting up to no good, and the feel-good adventure story "Kon-Tiki." This Norwegian production relays the semi-fictionalized tale of Thor Heyerdahl, a real-life researcher with a wild hypothesis that Polynesia was settled by Peruvian natives who sailed to the islands all by themselves. "There's no way they could've pulled that off," the scientific community protested. "Yes huh they could," Heyerdahl conjectured, and putting his money where his mouth was, he set off on a journey of "yes huh they could," building a ship based on 1,500-year-old designs.
The historical accuracy of the movie is, predictably, a little sketchy, but "Kon-Tiki" is a beautifully produced film with bright-eyed curiosity and perilous acts of derring-do all the way down to its core.
