It
makes perfect sense George Clooney would sign up for the remake of this
Norwegian film. It includes two of his favorite activities: scuba diving and
blaming America. It is the early 1980s, when Norway is poised to become
enormously wealthy thanks to the discovery of oil in the North Sea. Evidently,
that is a bad thing. Constructing a pipeline to reach it will be a tricky proposition.
Two advanced deep sea diver brothers are supposed to do the hardest parts, but
they will be engulfed by a shadowy conspiracy in Erik Skjoldbjærg’s Pioneer (trailer here), which opens this
Friday in New York.
As
Pioneer opens, Petter is about to
make history for enduring the deepest simulated dive. He will also start
hallucinating. Can we ever really trust his perceptions going forward? It is
hard to say, because Skjoldbjærg never overtly plays the ambiguous reality-untrustworthy
POV cards. Near as we can tell, Petter just shakes off his light-headedness and
moves on to the next mission. This time he and his brother Knut will be diving
for real. However, since the American engineering firm has assumed operational
control, they will now be breathing in the Yanks’ double-secret oxygen tank
additive.
Of
course, the dive goes spectacularly bad, culminating in Knut’s death. Frankly,
it kind of-sort of looks like Petter’s fault, but others quite considerately
step forward to take the blame. A-ha, it must be the additive. If he can just
get a sample to a colleague, he will be able to prove, well he’s not quite sure
what, but something really bad.
Forget
the unreliable narrator, Pioneer gives
us an unreliable script. Credited to Skjoldbjærg and a battery of three other
screenwriters, it keeps the conspiracy ridiculously murky. Basically, all we
can glean with certainty is the Americans will do anything for oil and there is
a man with a limp out there up to no good.
On
the plus side, Pioneer perfectly channels
the atmosphere and vibe of paranoid 1970s thrillers, like Parallax View. As Petter (whose entire wardrobe seems to be
corduroy), Aksel Hennie looks so Seventies, it is almost tragic. He also
projects a quiet mania that really helps the film chug along. Wes Bentley and
Stephen Lang chew a bit of scenery as the villainous Americans, but they never
elevate their stock characters above the level of predictable cliché. Likewise,
Miss Bala’s Stephanie Sigman is
largely wasted as Knut’s widow Maria, who simply turns up from time to time to
pretend she’s not guilt-tripping Petter when she really is.
