Kon-Tiki (2012)

The Ronning/Sandberg retelling of the Thor Heyerdal epic journey from Peru to Polynesia is one of the year’s most religious films. It posits two kinds of faith. 

Heyerdal (Pal Sverre Hagen) has faith in his anthropological knowledge, even if it sails in the face of the science of the day. When he throws the modern wire coils overboard, he rests his and his five mates’ lives on his confidence that his theory will prove true. He will complete the crossing with only the primitive technology. The Inca sun god Kon-Tiki is the other object of faith. Emblazoned on the sail, the god’s face frequently commands the men’s attention, heartens them through crises, and attends when they seem all alone in the world. 

The two faiths work together. Because Heyerdal can’t swim his very undertaking seems an act of religious faith, a confidence that the dangerous and mysterious world beyond will support him. This is borne out when he’s thrown overboard by the killer reef -- just when he can walk to the Polynesian shore. The conventional science of the world's scholars is trumped by the insight and courage of the man who trusts the knowledge his experience has won him.

Obviously a sea journey is a kind of Road film, where the characters grow into maturity by confronting and overcoming a series of tests and tribulations. Each of the men grows through the experience, like the engineer who grows into a fisheries career and the man who at first hates the parrot but is outraged when the sharks feed on it. The engineer’s theory of the 13th wave being the strongest has no grounding in science, just the superstitious faith in that number. As it happens the anchor is cut loose by a jagged rock after the 10th wave, in the kind of happy accident in which the faithful find the hand of their god.

The film’s religious core is the cinematic tour de force right after the navigator assures the men they are indeed on course to Polynesia. After their exhilarated celebration they collapse on the right side of the deck, their heads together, their bodies radiating out into a star shape. The camera pulls up and away from them. The heroes we have watched in closeup sweat and strain through storms and battles shrink into a speck in the darkness. The camera tracks through the stratosphere, past the Milky Way, through the heavens -- a god’s eye view if there were one, other than that painted Kon-Tiki -- and then it reverses back down to return to the mortals on their raft in the daylit water. That sequence defines the magnificence of man as recognizing his modest place in the interwoven elements of the natural world -- and the putative beyond. Man realizes his greatest self by submitting to the larger order. The film’s most obvious splurge of technology is its clearest statement of old-fashioned faith.