There are two movies playing out in the Norwegian film Pioneer. The first is a gritty procedural of a deep-sea dive, and the second, and more dominant, is a tense thriller. While at first glance these two separate stories of the film feel markedly different, even potentially at odds, they are two parts of a whole. Each shares a feeling of claustrophobia, physically and psychologically, that carries the film and makes it an engrossing experience.

Back in the late 1970’s, Norway discovered oil off its coastline and sought to build a pipeline. But the government would only agree to the pipeline’s construction on the condition that test dives were made to ensure the safety of the program. This required co-operating with an American company–here represented by Wes Bentley and Stephen Lang–that had the necessary equipment to successfully manage the dive. This makes for more than a simple cultural clash. First, it allows writer-director Erik Skjoldbjærg to play up the pernicious international interpretation of the United States as a domineering, empire-building bully. Second, it enables Skjoldbjærg to reference his debt to 1970’s American conspiratorial thrillers.

Little about the start of Pioneer’s initial premise suggests what it will turn into. Petter (Aksel Hennie) and his brother Knut (André Eriksen) are two of the Norwegian divers tasked with performing the test dive. Skjoldbjærg sketchily lays out their relationship, antagonistic but ultimately loving. They stand in stark contrast: Knut is a family man with a wife (Stephanie Sigman) and son; Petter is the slovenly uncle. Here the film finds some melodrama worthy of a very poorly written soap opera (and I say that as an apologetic fan of soaps). The film never convincingly establishes these relationships, but then again its real interests seem to lie elsewhere.

However, the film excels in other regards. During the dive, inexplicably something goes wrong, leaving Knut unconscious and his diving mask smashed open. In a fantastic, nerve-wracking scene, Petter gives Knut his oxygen tank and swims back up with his brother’s body, under threat of getting decompression sickness.

Skjoldbjærg’s manner for shooting this scene is one he takes for the rest of the film. He situates the viewer both in the psychological head space of his protagonist and the physical space of the environment. Both confining and paranoia-inducing.

At this point–about 40 minutes in–the film shifts gears. Knut doesn’t survive the incident, and Petter suspects foul-play. As Petter’s superiors and government agencies systematically deflect his concerns and questions, he becomes further convinced of his suspicions. But almost to the end of its runtime, Pioneer continues a sense of skepticism around Petter’s reliability. For one thing, prior to the dive, Petter and the other Norwegian divers were placed in a pressure chamber to test their ability to withstand the deep ocean pressures. The chamber had a hallucinatory effect on them. This element calls into question Petter’s credibility, and his obsession with discovering the truth becomes all-consuming as he grapples with his own grasp on reality.

A favorable opinion of Pioneer depends entirely on one’s response to the presentation of the plot. A favorable assessment might politely describe it as convoluted. The film’s plot is, centered as it is on a conspiracy, needlessly self-involved and complicated. But I think criticizing it for this misses the point. As previously mentioned, Skjoldbjærg draws inspiration from 1970’s American thrillers. These films–like The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor–arose out of disillusionment after Watergate and the Vietnam War. While a few of these films have really great plots, they were more interested in a sustained feeling of paranoia and distrust, and they often had their conspiracies encompass just about everyone imaginable, including the highest reaches of government.

Pioneer does not attempt anything quite so vast and far-reaching, but does play around in that same convention of thrillers. Plot matters less here than a constant sense of dread and obscure mystery. Trying to pick apart the film and its plot is easy to do. The focus should be on the nervy, tension-filled pleasures of the film. (After all, The Parallax View, for example, does not make a lick of sense and is a standard of the genre). In its back-half, Pioneer holds an adrenaline-fueled single-mindedness: Petter is an everyman caught up in something even he does not quite fully understand. His investigation involves plenty of double crosses, reveals, counter-reveals, and moments of misdirection. Eventually the plot ceases to matter.

It helps that the film has such a strong visual design to support this shaky plot. Cinematographer Jallo Faber does an excellent job of creating a moody, anxious atmosphere. He nicely plays around with lights and shadows to capture the insidiousness at hand. Skjoldbjærg’s shoots a number of scenes in close-ups that emphasize the tight spaces and the feeling of being trapped. But every so often he will pull back and show a character dwarfed by their environment, as just another pawn in the game at hand. This is smart, involving filmmaking that elevates a premise that has only so much momentum to it. By its end, Pioneer drags out, running out of avenues in its loopy storytelling. After all, even the best conspiracies have their limits.

Pioneer trailer

In his debut feature, Dylan Baker (Spider-Man 2, Secretariat) pays homage to the miraculous story of Travis Freeman, a former high school football player from Corbin, Kentucky. Something of a town hero, Travis lost his sight completely at the height of his football career due to an infection of the optic nerve. With the support of his coach, teammates, and loved ones, Travis learned to maximize his other senses and worked his way back onto the football field, returning to the sport no one thought he’d ever play again. The film stars Mark Hapka as Travis Freeman and Baker as his father, Larry Freeman.

We caught up with Baker about how he found Travis’ story, his experience directing for the first time, how the film has touched people, portraying people of faith in a positive light, the logistical nightmare of night football, and more.

23 Blast  is playing now in select cities and opens this Friday in the Bay Area

How did you find yourself in the director’s seat?
Dylan: It’s definitely something I’d thought about for a long time, but I figured I’d have to write a script from scratch and raise all that money, so once I got married and had a child I thought, oh forget this! [laughs] Three years ago, Toni Hoover, who was a high school friend of my wife, had moved back to this little town of Corbin, Kentucky. She came to me and my wife Becky and said she’d written this script about this boy she knew about and asked us to act in it. We thought, “That film will never get made, so that’s an easy yes!” When I read it, I was really excited by the story. The script had problems, so I started offering some suggestions and we worked on the script together. She asked me about some casting, and we worked on that, and all of a sudden she asked me to direct and this all happened after that.

What was your reaction to being asked to direct for the first time?
Dylan: My first reaction was the sane one: “No, absolutely not. This is not anything I should be doing. No. Stop.” But about three seconds later, I was like, “Wait a minute. When is anybody going to ask you that again?” After I thought about it and realized it was a good story, and Toni was a family friend, and she already had some money together, I called my good friend Gary Donatelli, and the three of us decided to produce the film together. We got some good people to join in and we went ahead and did it.

Travis’ story is truly inspiring; how have you seen it touch people in different ways?
Dylan: You do get a response from women who are so excited that this is a film their whole family can see. There are also people of faith who really react to the film well. They love the fact that it portrays people of faith positively, which is rare in films today. I have a good friend who works for our family, and her child was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy about 4 or 5 years ago. They’ve gone through hearing that he couldn’t do anything to the point now where he’s playing tennis with his father once a week. When they went to see the film, she told me it was uncanny. She said the scene where the doctor has to tell them what life is going to be like from now on is exactly what happened to them. A response like that makes you doubly happy that you were part of a film like this. If anyone can find comfort in this film I’ll be happy.

You mentioned something interesting there. I’m not a person of faith, but most of my family is and I love them dearly. I don’t like that people of faith are portrayed in a negative light so frequently.
Dylan: I think that in cinema we go through cycles of who we can say is the bad guy. Is it the Nazi? That was totally fine. For a while it was Japanese guys flying fighter planes. That was fine, too. Now it’s the Jihad, and for a while it’s also been people of faith. It will be people who decide to use their religion to screw up somebody’s life. It’s such a negative portrayal. When we set out to make this film, Travis and his parents were obviously people of very strong faith. I knew that however people saw this film, it would affect what they thought about this family. I worked really hard to try to bring that into the script, people who feel strongly enough about their connection with God that they wanted to inspire others. Travis Freeman is this guy who had that influence on people where he became their friend and got them to be believers. He wants to start a ministry, and I think his personality is strong enough. He’s able to look at the bright side of things.

In what capacity was Travis involved in the film?
Dylan: From the beginning Toni told them she was going to write this script and the Freemans said, “Go at it!” They gave her the rights and were happy to do it. We talked to the Freemans several times when we started, and we thought we wouldn’t bother them anymore. But the first or second day of shooting, they walked up to the set and asked if it was okay if they watched. I said, “Of course!” It might not have been every day, but it was close.

I asked Mary Freeman if she thought it’d be alright if we shot in the town church, and she went to find out. They were totally up for it. We filmed on a Saturday, and the parishioners and choir showed up, and it was really that kind of shoot where people fell over themselves to help us out. They housed some of the actors and crew in their homes because, as you know, an indie budget is not too big. [laughs]

What were some of the logistical hurdles you had to leap over?
Dylan: One of the biggest ones was that I kept turning to the screenwriter and saying, “Wait…it’s night football? Can’t it be played in the afternoon?!” He said, “No, in Kentucky we play at night!” All of a sudden, we had to schedule a week of all night shoots and do all of the stuff at the stadium. We had to get the fans in, get the football plays all ready…that was a logistical nightmare. But Gary Donatelli had worked on Monday Night Football, so he called up some of his buddies. We had four Red cameras shooting different angles, and all of the guys knew about football and the right football angles. What was hilarious was that they had these cameras, and they’d say, “Where’s the zoom?” I said, “What? This camera doesn’t have a zoom!” [laughs] There was a little learning curve there, but they all had a great time with a new vocabulary and a new way of shooting. That was interesting, I must say.

The other thing that was kinda fun was that we needed the Travis Freeman house. We looked at theirs, but it was really too small and would be too hard to shoot in. My line producer came to me and said, “Dylan, I’m looking to rent this house for the couple of months we’re here. I want you to take a look at it.” We ended up shooting that as the Freeman house. The production designer loved it because she got to fix up the whole house!

To wrap things up, why don’t you talk about your cast. You’ve got some great talent on the roster.
Dylan: I’ve worked with a lot of great people. The first people I called for the film said yes in most instances–Stephen Lang, Timothy Busfield…He’d directed a couple of episodes of Damages I did. I wrote him and asked if he wanted to be in the film, and within a minute he wrote back and said, “I’ll do it!” I did Secretariat with Fred Thompson, and he immediately said yes. I was shocked. For the mobility coach I had a real tough time–I turned over in bed and found this redhead and said, “Hey! Wanna play this part?” [laughs] My wife Becky played that part, and she knocked it out of the park. I knew she would.

Unfortunately, I was rather unimpressed with the 3D effect in the theater. Being that this was my first 3D experience, I was imagining the 3D parts to be a little better. I think I would have enjoyed the film just as much without the 3D. After about 20 minutes, I nearly forgot about the 3D, except for a few scenes. So if anything don’t let that be the only reason you watch this film, believe it or not, it has a story too.

Avatar is about a paraplegic war veteran, Jake, who is brought in to learn the culture of another planet, Pandora. Our military has greedy corporate intentions of mining for precious materials which happens to be loaded on Pandora. While trying to dig up information about the local customs of the Na’vi race, he begins to fall in love with one of them. This forces him to choose between carry out the mission or to take the side of the Na’vi and fight for their land.

The concept behind Avatar was very interesting. I saw metaphors of racial issues, environmentalism, and even religion. Somewhat similar to District 9. Looking at the big picture, the film was well written and imaginative. Which is what a film that is the highest grossing film in history should consist of. It was also one of the most expensive movies ever made up to this date with an estimated budget of US $280 million.

It was by no means perfect though. First off, on more than a couple occasions, the film was fairly predictable and typical. There were some minor flaws too such as, how did the Na’vi get guns in the battle towards the end?

Some of the things I enjoyed best were the little details, such as: the interfaces of the computers they used, the way monitors were curved and transparent, how a tablet computer should really function, those jellyfish looking creatures and the way you had to “connect” to the animals. I thought the CGI was top notch and Oscar worthy. It’s pretty incredible that 60% of the film is actually photo-realistic CGI.

Bottom line, I thought the film was worth watching, especially for the broad concepts, technologies and metaphors. The subtle details. It did a lot of things pretty well but it didn’t get too far from the stereotypical Hollywood formula for a blockbuster film. Perhaps it didn’t want or need to though.

Update: It did end up winning Best Cinematography, Best Visual Effects, and Best Art Direction at the Oscars.