The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey
| The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey | |
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The Navigator DVD cover
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| Directed by | Vincent Ward |
| Produced by | John Maynard |
| Written by |
Geoff Chapple Kely Lyons Vincent Ward |
| Starring |
Chris Haywood Marshall Napier Paul Livingston Jay Laga'aia |
| Music by | Davood A. Tabrizi |
| Cinematography | Geoffrey Simpson |
| Edited by | John Scott |
| Distributed by | Home Cinema Group |
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Release date
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Running time
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93 minutes |
| Country | New Zealand Australia |
| Language | English |
| Budget | A$4.3 million |
| Box office | A$480,344 (Australia)) |
The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey is a 1988 feature film, an official Australian-New Zealand co-production, directed by Vincent Ward. It won numerous New Zealand and Australian awards, including the Australian Film Institute Award for Best Film, and several awards at European fantasy film festivals.
During the Black Death of 14th century England, people in a remote Cumbrian mountain village listen with fear to tales of the gruesome plague that has engulfed the world. In an attempt to stave off the infection, they rely upon the visions of a boy, named Griffin, who has a reputation for having a kind of "second sight". With the backing of the village's most famous adventurer, a man named Connor, whom Griffin idolizes, a group of the townsfolk travel to a nearby cavern. Bringing good copper ore to be melted and cast into shape, they dig down into the earth, all the while racing against time and the coming of the next full moon, in an effort to place a holy cross on the steeple of "the biggest Church in all of Christendom" as an offering for God's protection.
As the full moon is rising, the villagers break though into a smooth-lined tunnel, and then, finding a ladder, climb up and into late twentieth century New Zealand. Up until this point, the film has been shown in black and white. Now the adventure continues in colour film. The villagers marvel at the various technologies, never questioning what year it might be, believing that such things are only natural in great cities. But Griffin is haunted by a dark vision as the villagers come closer to fulfilling their quest.
The idea for the film originated when Ward attempted to cross a German autobahn and became stranded in the middle. This inspired Ward (while trapped on the motorway) to imagine what it would be like for a medieval person to find themselves in such a 20th-century situation. He was also inspired by a report about two Papua New Guinean tribesmen who briefly visited an Australian city, and the child's myth of digging through the earth and coming out the other side. The original script was "a broad comedy, rather brash and funny and full of warrior gnomes".
The film is in part an attempt to view modern life in a way which makes it seem strange and fresh, as if seen for the first time, and speculation about what the ancestors of modern New Zealanders might make of them and their world. Ward has made several analogies between 1980s New Zealanders and the medieval characters in the film. He has said that "Many New Zealanders going overseas for the first time are trusting and almost medieval in their outlook" and has also compared the medievals' attempts to fend off the plague with New Zealand's nuclear free policy (alluded to in the nuclear submarine scene) and its consequences, particularly the Rainbow Warrior bombing. In both cases a small community attempts to determine its own fate in the face of a larger power. Ward also felt that there were more general similarities between the 14th and 20th centuries, in particular large-scale war and (in the context of 1980s fears about AIDS) terrifying disease. However he has also said that too much can be made of the film's paralleling of the bubonic plague and AIDS.
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