The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey (aka This Is The Real World, 1988)

I can only imagine what it would be like to stumble blindly upon Vincent Ward's 1988 film The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey, without knowing the big narrative trick that occurs a third of the way through. I'm not convinced that would be an easy endeavor - it's not as though it was treated as a secret from a marketing standpoint, with the trailers, promotional posters and taglines making it abundantly obvious where this particular medieval odyssey was headed. If you happened to catch the film while channel-surfing then you might have had more success...but only if you tuned in after the opening titles, which in television broadcasts reportedly came with onscreen warning not to adjust your set or be startled by the precursory sequences in black and white. Colour, viewers were assured, was eventually coming...and so was modernity. The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey is a time travel story, a point that was always used to draw in audiences, not to catch them off guard after first enticing them with the medieval setting promised in the subtitle (which for some releases even was swapped out for "A Time-Travel Adventure", making it as explicit as could be). From a commercial perspective, this makes perfect sense - the runaway success of Back To The Future just three years prior indicated that there was a great market for time-hopping adventures, while the sombre period drama that opens Ward's picture would likely have struggled to suffice as a hook in itself. But from a narrative view, it seems a shame. Ward's film is so artfully structured, and feels consciously designed to have blown its audience's minds with its sudden foray into the Twilight Zone (the episode "A Hundred Yards Over The Rim" was a possible influence on Ward). Fortunately, The Navigator is one of those films that really cannot be spoiled simply by divulging a few key plot details in advance. The mere knowledge that it takes a sharp turn from murky medieval drama into science-fiction romp does not prepare you for what an absolute thrill ride it is on an aesthetic and atmospheric level. The best way to describe it is that it subjects the viewer to the ambience of a dream within a dream, immersing us first in one terrifying nightmare scenario (cold, claustrophobic and marked by a sense of impending dread) before pushing us out into quite another (expansive, head-spinning and filled with strange and immediate dangers).

Our story opens in England, in the year 1348. Europe has been ravaged by the Black Death, but for now this is still all a distant rumble to our protagonists, the denizens of an isolated mining community in Cumbria. They've heard word of a symptom that signals imminent death, the development of a pus-filled boil in the armpit. They're also disturbed that one of their party, the wanderlusting Connor (Bruce Lyons) has journeyed out of the village and been absent for longer than expected. Meanwhile, Connor's younger brother Griffin (Hamish McFarlane), a child with second sight, is experiencing strange visions involving an underground pit and a church spire. Eventually Connor returns, although he brings little good news, having witnessed first-hand how the plague has devastated communities all over the land, and knowing that its advancement upon their village is all but inevitable. There is preliminary talk about embarking on pilgrimage to a big church in a distant city, with the aspiration of gaining divine protection with an offering, but when refugees from an eastern community pass by with signs of infection, the villagers fear that it is already too late, and that they will have started to succumb by sunrise. Their last remaining hope lies with Griffin, who believes that his visions indicate a geographical shortcut; there is a tunnel in the earth that will lead them to a great church in the furthermost regions of the world, and if they are able to erect a Cumbrian cross upon its spire before the night is through, they might convince God to spare them. Griffin sets out with Connor and four other men - the eternally po-faced Searle (Marshall Napier), the genial Martin (Paul Livingston), the thieving Arno (Chris Haywood) and the timid, guileless Ulf (Noel Appleby), the last of whom has brought along offering of his own, a wooden craving of the Virgin Mary that he intends to place in the church as a tribute to his deceased mother. Our six plucky pilgrims burrow into the earth, and eventually emerge on the other side, to be greeted by a dazzling city of light. Unbeknownst to them, they are now in Auckland^[1], New Zealand, and the year is 1988. The past may be in black and white, but the future (the present) exists in glorious (albeit nocturnal) colour.

The most obvious comparison here would be The Wizard of Oz (1939), which used a similar visual trick in presenting the Kansas-based bookends in sepia and the adventures in Oz in Technicolor. The Kansas sequences are coded as the "real world" because they are more grounded (at least until the tornado strikes), but have a colourless drudgery that suggests a world not fully awake and in tune with its potential. The result is a kind of dual unreality - we might say that Kansas itself plays like a dream, but a flatter, hazier dream that can only come into being while the vibrant, larger than life Oz is lying dormant. In Ward's film, the black and white opening imposes a similar disconnect - the middle ages are a distant, unfamiliar world submerged in a bleakness so unspeakable as to seem incomprehensible to modern viewers. There is, nevertheless, a great humanity that emerges from this desolation. The characters - Griffin, Connor, Ulf, Arno and their company - have distinct personalities and a clear affinity. They are affable and entirely relatable. We might not feel so at ease being immersed in this world, but we have little difficulty in empathising with its inhabitants. We become so aligned with these characters that when we finally arrive in 20th-century Auckland, we experience it through their eyes, as a sprawling, dazzling onslaught of light and colour. As with The Wizard of Oz we end up with a dual unreality, although in this case it is the world that is ostensibly familiar and mundane that becomes the larger than life fantasy, every bit as grand and impressive as the fairy tale world of Oz. The pilgrims are overwhelmed by its beauty, declaring it to be God's own city, but are also filled with questions about the practical ramifications of such a place -wondering, for example, how much tallow would be required to keep so many lights ablaze. The city is beyond their comprehension, and yet these pilgrims are not fools, approaching the foreign metropolis with a keenness and a desire to assess and make sense of what they see.

It isn't long before this gleaming light show is exposed as a region of unforeseen peril. Ulf, lured by the splendor of the vehicle headlights, wanders into a highway and narrowly avoids being knocked down by incoming traffic. He is left so shaken by the experience that he is subsequently unable to cross with the others, forcing them to leave him behind as they venture into the city. It is in Ulf's traumatic encounter that we find the most palpable echoes of the real-life experience that reportedly inspired Ward to make the film, when he attempted to cross a German autobahn and got stuck in the middle. He came to the realisation that there was plenty of terror lurking in the banalities of modern living, and envisioned an adventure in which these were the dragons to be overcome by explorers from another time. Auckland entails no shortage of nightmarish run-ins, but they are nightmarish in ways that recall the morbid mundaneness of the public information film, as experienced through the eyes of the ingenuous (and interwoven with a few surreal touches lifted directly from cartoons, such as when Connor takes a mouth-contorting ride on the city's train system). The pilgrims discover the potentially deadly hazards that come with crossing roads, trespassing on construction sites and lingering around railway lines, evoking the memory of what it was like to have fears of these things instilled in you as a child, and the sensation that these are not modern miracles to be marvelled at, but omnipresent hazards that give catastrophe endless openings from which to strike. It is not surprising that Ulf, a more innocent and childlike figure than the actual child of the group, forever clutching his wooden Virgin as both a comforting toy and a mother substitute, decides that this world is more than he can bear at the very first hurdle.

20th-century Auckland feels notably less human than 14th-century Cumbria, with technology having displaced nature, dominating a landscape in which people seem largely absent or indistinct. The vehicles race by like stampeding beasts, their occupants seemingly indifferent to the pilgrims. When Connor, who insists on separating himself from the rest of the group and locating the church on his own, wanders across a patch of rubble, he finds a crane descending on him that looks uncannily like a monstrous spider. A nuclear submarine surfacing in the harbour is perceived as an attacking leviathan (the reality, as we'll see below, is considerably more ominous). The city is not entirely without its human side, however. The pilgrims find all-important allies in the employees of a modern foundry, led by the benevolent Smithy, played by Desmond Kelly (the only Aucklander outside the foundry to have any degree of significant dialogue is the man from whom the pilgrims "borrow" a horse to use as a winch). Neither party ever quite figures out that their new friends are from another time, with Smithy and his crew being at first bemused by the appearance of the pilgrims, but arriving at the conclusion that they are out-of-towners who have "spent too much time in the bush". In truth, they have little difficulty connecting with these eccentric travellers because they are their modern counterparts, awaiting destruction of a different kind in the form of the "wreckers" set to call on the foundry in the morning to put them out of business. We might connect these unseen "wreckers" to the menacing construction devices encountered by Connor, indicating that these men are as out of their depth as the pilgrims in a world of impersonal and relentless urbanisation. The most pronounced difference between the two bands is the modern crew's lack of religious sentiment. Smithy explains that a local church had previously commissioned a cross of their own, but their preparations had come to naught because the church was unable to produce the necessary funds. Martin is shocked by the implications - "The church is poor?" - and is just as perplexed by the crew's response that it's "like any other business...when they don't want what you're selling." Smithy is given pause when it turns out that the cross the Cumbrians want casting perfectly fits the mould they had prepared earlier, but decides that they must have come on behalf of that same church. Should we chalk this up to fate? Strange coincidence? Or might there be a more troubling explanation for why the past and the present seem so perfectly in sync?

It is only when Griffin, having become lost and separated from the others, wanders into a television shop and sees the various horrors on display on its great wall of screens, that Ward's intention in mixing the two time periods becomes starkly apparent. The first image we see is footage from a nature documentary, in which a hawk is pursuing a rabbit across desert terrain - a symbol of impending destruction that foreshadows the grim broadcast to follow on the subject of nuclear proliferation. Smithy and his companions might presently await the destruction of their personal territory with the coming of the wreckers, but there is a far greater threat hanging over them, articulated in the studio voice that declares: "This is the real world, 1988. You can isolate one little pocket of the world and say, nuclear-free. Oh, you can try. But then, there is no refuge. No pocket, no escape from the real world." The Navigator is not so much a film about the Black Death as it is about the apocalypse rearing its head within the present. It's in this statement that the significance of having the medieval travellers emerge in New Zealand (the director's nationality notwithstanding), as opposed to, say, modern-day Carlisle, becomes most pronounced. The plight of the small Cumbrian village is an allegory for the plight of New Zealand in choosing to remain nuclear-free in a world dominated by overwhelming nuclear tension. This 20th-century apocalypse isn't restricted to the terrors of the A-bomb, with plagues and vulnerability to disease remaining as much a reality as they did in the 14th century. The spectre of Death materialises in the form of the Grim Reaper, hurling bowling balls at defenceless humans substituting for pins, immersing us once again in the macabre aura of the public information film. The footage in question is from an Australian AIDS-awareness film, the bowling scenario being a grisly metaphor for how AIDS is a danger facing humanity as a collective, not the select groups once assumed. The film's most horrific image, in which a mother and baby, having survived the first bowl, are physically torn apart when the Reaper makes that spare, is fully discernible over Griffin's shoulder. Everyone - men, women and children of all stripes - are the terrified playthings of a force as unspeakable as it is unsparing.

Martin's prior assessment that, "if the evil was on our side, then surely God's goodness is on this one", turns out, perhaps not to our surprise, to be bogus. We are left wondering if the time barrier breach had been possible because there is so precious little to separate these two worlds. The Navigator takes an eternalist view, in which the apocalypse that loomed in the past is suggested to be effectively no different to the apocalypse that looms now. The precise nature of the threat might have shifted, but the battle against oblivion remains unchanged, as one of fundamentally fragile humans up against destructive forces inconceivably greater than themselves. This is a struggle that Searle has, on a personal level, understood all too well even before the coming of the plague, as he recounts how he has watched each of his family die off through various instances of misfortune. Significantly, Griffin's encounter with the television shop comes after a disturbing additional vision indicating that the endeavor to erect the cross upon the church spire will come at a cost, with one of the pilgrims falling to their death (he fears it will be Connor, on the basis that the doomed individual is wearing a gauntlet that only his brother possesses). The closing component of his vision shows a cloaked figure standing before a coffin that has been set adrift on a body of water, an image that eerily parallels the broadcast vision of the Reaper bowling for victims.

The question Ward's film poses is what, then, are the little people expected to do when living in the face of such all-encompassing horror? Smithy and co make it clear that the modern world has largely moved on from the kinds of action that the pilgrims would consider wholly practical solutions. Would any prospective efforts on our part to change our fate be as quixotic, in practice, as the pilgrims' attempts to keep sickness out of their village by attaching a cross to a spire on the other side of the world? Or does it take an act this quixotic, that steadfast willingness to face what feel like insurmountable odds, to inspire the action that might very well alter the course of history? At the climax of the film, once the pilgrims have reached St Patrick's Cathedral, the great church of Griffin's dreams, and begun the process of attempting to scale it to and to fix their spike to the top, we see their efforts bring out a sense of unity, in a way that totally transcends the barriers of time. Smithy and his crew show up to lend a hand, and the broader human element of the city is finally teased out of hiding, as other Aucklanders gather on the ground below to watch. They have no context for what is happening, yet are compelled to cheer the pilgrims on regardless, recognising their efforts as an act of valiant defiance. Intercut with the modern day spectators are black and white shots of the villagers left behind in the 14th-century village, awaiting the sounds of church bells to indicate the success of their adventurers. The people of both eras are now intermingled, as if their respective fates are tied up in the outcome of the pilgrims' endeavor. The coming of the brilliant sunrise signals not just their looming deadline, but the passage of time turning as it has always done, indifferent to the march of human history within its midst.

(Spoilers now follow)

The pilgrims succeed in attaching the cross to the spire before sunrise, but it turns out to be Griffin himself who takes that fateful plunge, bringing an abrupt halt to Auckland's manifestation. The fall apparently takes him back down to reality, for we find ourselves in the pits below medieval Cumbria once again, the world restored to black and white, as Griffin recounts his vision to his reunited companions. Ulf is disappointed that he missed out on the adventure, but Griffin obligingly works in an addendum, assuring Ulf that he conquered the road by digging underneath it, and was able to show the wooden Virgin the great city on the other side. He does, however, stop short of honoring Ulf's request that the Virgin make it all the way to the cathedral, as if sensing, forebodingly, some limitations in how drastically one might rewrite fate. The trip to Auckland is contextualised as "just a dream", in a manner not dissimilar to Dorothy's trip to Oz, with a final comic punchline in which the city once hailed as God's own is dismissed by Searle as "a vision of Hell." The group then hears the voices of their fellow villagers calling out to them, proclaiming that the new day has come, and nobody among them is displaying any sign of illness. But as the adventurers make their triumphant return, Griffin makes a disturbing discovery - he has developed a pus-filled boil under his arm. He confronts Connor, and finds a similar boil concealed on his throat. Connor was carrying the infection all along, having picked it up on his travels and returned with it to the village. Connor states that he was not aware he'd been infected until he was in the pit, at which point he made the effort to keep himself separate from the others. Frightened and with no other recourse, he came to believe that Griffin's vision would be his salvation. He assures Griffin that the story he shared has indeed cured with, the boil he bears being now nothing more than a scar. The other pilgrims ask if everything has been in vain, and if they will all die after all, but Griffin insists that they will not, for only one person perished in his vision. He announces that he will not return to the village, and tasks Connor with retelling his story to the villagers, for this now is the only weapon they have in their fight against oblivion: "You'll bring them round, make them believe my story! They must!" The film ends with Griffin, having been laid to rest in a wooden coffin, being set out to drift upon the waters as his companions bid him a mournful farewell.  The closing shot shows the silhouette of the cloaked Connor within the foreground, observing the departure of his deceased brother in an arrangement identical to that of Griffin's prophecy.

It is a hauntingly ambiguous ending, filled with imagery that could potentially point us to either conclusion. All of the adult travellers are standing together in a final show of unity, but do they look like a collective strength ready to take on the odds, no matter how seemingly insurmountable, or more like bowling pins waiting to be struck down by forces perpetually beyond their control? Also present for Griffin's departure is Connor's wife Linnet (Sarah Peirse), who is holding a crying baby - the seed of a possible future for the village, or a baleful echo of the mother and baby doomed to be ripped apart by the Reaper's thrust? Is out final impression of Connor that he is a protective figure who will make good on his brother's wishes, or does his shrouded form still recall the Grim Reaper, being the one who has brought the infection to his community and potentially sealed everyone's fates? Has Connor really been cured by his brother's story, and will the act of believing it also be enough to save the villagers? Is this story nothing more than a diversion, to keep its recipients from having to look their harsh reality square in the eye, or is it a stirring reminder of how they need to keep believing in themselves in order to implement change? Or are there some changes that are simply beyond their power to implement? The fate of our heroes remains uncertain, and all in a way that functions as a call to arms to Ward's viewership within the present. I mentioned at the start that the entire picture plays like a dream within a dream, although whose dream it might be would be anyone's guess. It feels, appropriately, as if the modern world has fallen asleep and had a vision of its own possible future, filtered through the ordeals of a past it thought long behind it. Does it foretell of our salvation, or of our inevitable destruction? That part of the dream is still murky.

[1] The city is never explicitly identified as Auckland, but while Ulf is digging there is a sign indicating that we are in the vicinity of Onehunga.