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Kon-Tiki Movie Review

Kon-Tiki is a 1950 Norwegian documentary film directed by and starring Thor Heyerdahl. This was a very strong movie for the period, but it was very much a product of its time.

This is a film about the Kon-Tiki expedition of the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl. The 2012 adventure film of the same name is better in my opinion, but I still liked this doc for what it is, which is an old-fashioned documentary film from the fifties that had authenticity due to being made by the person who did this voyage himself. That lent the film a lot of credibility.

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This is quite an amateurish production from a technical standpoint. The cinematography is lackluster, the editing is only okay and the directing is just serviceable. This was to be expected from a film that was made by a man who had never worked in cinema before this. But the movie still flowed well and it was so short at an hour that it pretty much flew by. A lot happened here, so it was very engaging to watch.

Kon-Tiki very much has that old-fashioned adventure charm of yesteryear when men would go on these epic adventures to prove a point or to be the first at something. It’s a great artifact in that way. My favorite moments were the animal ones – the whale shark scenes were suitably intense and the parrot was so amusing.

I did not care for the narration that was detailed for sure, but off-putting at times. The disregard that the narrator has for the native people and their culture made him so unlikable. Couple that with the British voiceover that I watched on the YouTube version and you’ve got the perfect combination of stuck-up and racist European condescension.

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Kon-Tiki was nominated for an Oscar and it ended up winning, being one of just a few Norwegian films to ever win an Academy Award. I am happy that it won as it was the first sign of the Academy becoming more international decades from this point.