Best to leave your sense of history at home -- this is more like a badly translated tale from the Vinland Sagas, only without the skill in storytelling. The flaws and missteps here are legion: historical inaccuracies and gauche anachronisms, trite, expository dialogue, and heavy-handed acting.

The natives are noble savages, underdressed and lit in red to contrast with the skins-padded, chain-mailed, blue-washed Vikings. But what can you do with Vikings? They're pirates without the charm, and here the procession of belching, grunting, mace-swinging hordes suggests nothing so much as the primordial beginnings of biker gangs, hair metal aesthetic, and whatever faction of staged wrestling you find most interesting.

This is a film that truly exemplifies the theory that sentimentality and brutality are never far from each other; there are as many lingering shots of a mooning "Starfire" (the token female of note, played by a diffident Moon Bloodgood, who was probably cast on the strength of her ... name?) as there are close-ups of heads being liberated from bowing necks.

The editing here is terrible; the framing and perspective are as disorienting and ill-conceived as a bad music video. The sprawling, frenetic action feels strangely oppressive; the jarring percussive score blatantly foreshadows in a film where foreshadowing is gratuitous -- by the time you hear the echo, the head is rolling down the hill.

"Pathfinder" is unblinkingly committed to beheadings and peppered with stale, earnest platitudes, but it does have its moments, especially one memorable exchange between (I cringe to write) Ghost and Starfire. She wants to make sense of their life-and-death struggle. Desire renders him temporarily eloquent:

"There are two wolves fighting in each man's heart," he tells her.

"One is love. The other is hate."

"Which one wins?" she asks, more than curious.  

"Whichever one you feed the most."

A corny and derivative line, sure, but movingly delivered, and amidst all the grunting savagery on display the beauty of it blooms like a rose in nuclear winter.