The Navigator (1988)

Vincent Ward's mystical tale of a tiny 14th-century English hamlet during the devastation of the Black Plague mixes faith and fantasy in a compelling adventure. Ward creates a stark look with his high contrast black-and-white photography: dark huts against a snow-covered landscape and a gray sky, candles and campfires burning tiny pools of light in the midnight-black caves. The visions of young Griffin (Hamish McFarlane) break this austere style with color dreams, at first merely flashes of images, then a vivid narrative of a pilgrimage through the center of the earth. Griffin's older brother Connor (Bruce Lyons), who has just returned from the dying, diseased cities of England, leads this great journey to an alien world of metal beasts and towering ramparts (revealed as a modern New Zealand city) to make their offering to God. Ward keeps the camera tied to their experience, creating a nightmarish vision of familiar objects and locations: a busy highway, a junkyard, a remarkable run-in with a surfacing submarine. Throughout, Griffin's haunting flashes of the future taunt him with clues to a death in the party, but they don't reveal who. The Navigator defies genre, mixing fantasy and science fiction, religion and mysticism, historical realism and modern adventure, to create a compelling, beautiful, visually stunning leap of faith. --Sean Axmaker Amazon.com

What exactly were the other reviewers smoking?

I can appreciate a film that is more art than entertainment. Heck, I have watched "Citizen Kane" multiple times, which alone ought to qualify me for a medal. But this movie was painful to watch. I kept waiting, hoping, praying for it to get better with the thought: "No movie can really be this bad..." constantly running through my mind. Sadly, I was mistaken. This film was officially placed on my "Top Ten Worst Films" list.

I might someday purchase a used version to give as an excellent gag gift however... December 12, 2006

More admirable than engaging

Vincent Ward is one of those directors who make films that are easier to admire than to enjoy. The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey is an excellent example - striking visuals, harsh landscapes, painful accents that make key plot points incomprehensible and a big idea that doesn't work quite as well as you'd like it to. Kicking off in a harsh black and white Cumbria in the early 14th century, an isolated village is persuaded by a boy's visions that the only way to keep the plague out of their village is to tunnel to the other side of the world and erect a cross on the great church tower before dawn - only to find themselves in God's city (or New Zealand circa 1988 to us), a world of colour and lights crippled by its own plagues, redundancy, nuclear proliferation and AIDS. Blinded by television and information overload, the boy loses his ability to see beyond the knowledge that one of them will die in the attempt... There are a lot of pluses, not least the great faces in the cast, many of which look like they've literally stepped out of a Renaissance painting, but it never really engages as much as you'd like, leaving you an almost disinterested observer.

If you have a multi-region player, you're much better getting the Australian DVD than this shoddy NTSC release - the Australian DVD boasts a superb anamorphic widescreen transfer, trailer and trailers for Ward's Vigil and What Dreams May Come. June 18, 2006

To the clerk who turned me on to this one, thank you!

The premise was so intriguing, of course I rented it. And it became an instant favorite. All these years later it's in my top 5. I bought the dvd soon's I could. (Considering what a dvd copy seems to be fetching these days I wish I'd bought 5 or 6. Oh well.) Whatever in the plot seems like it just couldn't be, never mind, just go with it. It's a time-travel adventure not by machine but rather in the mind of a child, and all the how-come will resolve quite naturally. It's a beautiful uplifting (and heartbreaking) story. It's a whole-family film like no other. July 10, 2005

NOT thrilled

I purchased this disc in May 2004.
I has a VHS copy -taken from pay TV. While the DVD was a bit cleare/less grainy ,the video was 1.33:1 ,not 1.85:1 as advertised;also the sound was MONO ,not Dolby Surround as advertised. A good film but a technically inferior disc.
Edd.
iegolden@shaw.ca February 16, 2005

An exploration of our unconscious saviors

"The Navigator" is a film that truly explores the depths of the human mind and the heros that keep our existance in tact without us recognizing them. This movie is an excellent collection of information on the Hero's Journey, Jungian archetypes, and the three-part Freudian psyche. December 15, 2004

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