He finds a way to secure funding for the project, and with the help of a motley assemblage of crew members - including a frustrated engineer turned refrigerator salesman ( Anders Baasmo Christiansen) - Heyerdal's raft, the KON-TIKI, sets sail. His theories are mocked and derided by the scientific and exploration communities, and so Heyerdal decides to prove his theories correct by constructing a raft using only the materials methods available to those who made that journey so long ago. Intrigued, Heyerdal sets out to prove that it would indeed be possible for pre-Columbian South Americans from 1500 years ago to sail the 5000 miles from Peru to Polynesia. There's also regular cigarette smoking, and some alcohol drinking where the crew act drunk.ĭuring his research as an ethnographer and explorer, an elderly native of the island where Thor Heyerdal (Pal Sverre Hagen) and his wife have been conducting research for ten years tells him that it's the belief of his people that the very first settlers of Polynesia arrived not from regions west, but from the east. The inevitable tensions that arose amongst the Kon-Tiki crew are explored, as well as the derision Heyerdal faced from the scientific community. A young Heyerdal nearly drowns in a freezing lake after trying to impress his peers by hopping onto a thin block of ice to retrieve a saw. There are narrowly-avoided shark attacks, near-drownings, and a scene in which a shark is taken onto the raft, stabbed repeatedly and sliced open, resulting in lots of blood.

The movie doesn't shy away from the extreme peril Heyerdal and his crew faced when they crossed 5000 miles of the Pacific Ocean from Peru to Polynesia to prove that pre-Columbian South Americans could have conceivably been the first settlers of Polynesia. Parents need to know that Kon-Tiki is a 2012 adaptation of the classic nonfiction adventure story by legendary explorer Thor Heyerdal. Wine and liquor drinking, characters act drunk.ĭid you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Kon tiki novel