Is this the greatest movie ever made? No, but I was riveted by its urgency and passion, its painterly abstraction, its dedication to just being what it is and nothing more. What is it? A graphic novel come to life -- director Marcus Nispel (2003’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) created the look of the movie with illustrator Christopher Shy, who drew the whole film before they shot it; it’s available in book form -- and it’s worth seeing if movies like 300 and The 13th Warrior particularly speak to you. And you’ll want to see it on a big screen because it is so thrillingly visual: unlike so many excuses for movies these days, Pathfinder is a movie, meant to be projected in the dark and experienced with a crowd. It won’t be the same on a small screen, not even a big-screen small screen.

Oh, and Karl Urban is half naked through much of the film, so that’s nice, too.

Like 300, this isn’t a “real” story -- it’s not meant to be a documentary or a drama: it’s explicitly a “story” of the old kind, like we used to tell around the fire in the cave. It’s a “legend” of how one Viking orphan left behind in precolumbian North America by Norse raiders eventually saved his adoptive people, the Wampanoag Indians, when the raiders returned years later. Don’t be looking for historical authenticity -- though evidence is excellent that Vikings did explore the Maritime coast of North America, they probably weren’t the monsters they’re depicted as here -- and don’t be looking even for a grounded reality: the lushness of the green forests of the Indians doesn’t seem seasonally coincident with the snowy mountains where the invaders occupy.

But that’s not important. Pathfinder, like 300, is more concerned with the primitive emotional impact of peril to family, of love that binds people together, of violence that severs them. It’s on a much smaller scale here, of course: Ghost (Urban: The Bourne Supremacy, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King) has become one of the Wampanoag in the fifteen years since he was discovered, as a small boy, in the wreckage of a Viking longship, and despite some resentment that has more to do with romantic jealousy than his pale skin, he is a fully accepted member of the tribe. He’s has some competition for the heart and hand of Starfire (Moon Bloodgood: Eight Below), but all of the aggitta of this little triangle is relayed in a completely nonverbal way, through shy glances and bitter glares, and there’s something deep-down satisfying about a movie that trusts that you don’t need to have absolutely everything explained to you. It seems like such a small, obvious thing, but so few films -- especially “mere” comic book or action movies -- expect even this low level of involvement from the audience.

What gets overblown here, and what doesn’t, is what draws your sympathy or your fear. Ghost is not a stereotypical Scandanavian, all blond and blue-eyed -- he’s not quite so dramatically different-looking from his adopted family as he could be. But the invading Vikings, his kin, are exaggerated fiends, huge, ogreish men in grotesque armor and horned helmets over painted faces -- Clancy Brown (The Guardian, The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie) as the Viking leader is pretty horrifying; they speak a gutteral proto Norse (it’s actually Icelandic), which really sets the Vikings aside as alien because the Indians speak English as shorthand for “our native language, the one we understand without having to think about it.”

For all that Pathfinder is relentlessly violent -- it’s mostly just one long campaign as Ghost goes up against the Viking horde to protect his adoptive tribe, with much bone-crunching and head-bashing -- there’s an effortless, natural ease about the film, which doesn’t fuss too much with CGI and relies on organic stuntwork and real locations and beautiful cinematography and the force of its own simple convictions -- love is strong, and can save us; the seeds of our own destruction are in our own acts, and we create our own dooms -- to carry us through. The more I think about it, the more I realize I can’t stop thinking about it.

(Technorati tags: Pathfinder, Karl Urban, Clancy Brown, Vikings)