Starring Pal Sverre Hagen, Anders Baasmo Christiansen, and Tobias Santelmann. Rated G.

Did someone say “crazy Norwegian explorers and sharks”? Actually—because who doesn’t have a thing for Scandinavian insanity (you’ve seen Headhunters, right?)—Kon-Tiki will probably have you way before the scene that even sounds, amusingly, like the world’s most famous shark movie.

Unless you were his long-suffering wife, Liv (Agnes Kittelsen), real-life explorer and mad person Thor Heyerdahl (Pal Sverre Hagen) would have been a wild guy to hang with back in 1947—and maybe die with. Instead, Kon-Tiki (we get the English version, filmed simultaneously with the Oscar-nominated Norwegian version) lets us cling to Heyerdahl’s balsa raft for about 4,300 miles across the Pacific for the kind of exhilarating, old-fashioned adventure we’ve been secretly wanting.

Heyerdahl (who wrote the famous book and directed the 1950 Oscar-winning doc about his expedition) was bent on proving that Polynesia was first settled not by peoples from Asia, as was the accepted theory, but pre-Columbian travellers from Peru. When even the National Geographic Society scoffs at your educated hunch, who wouldn’t build a raft, gather some seafaring (and not) friends, and re-create that ancient voyage at the mercy of currents, winds, and giant, hungry fish? Okay, right.

Filmmakers Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg (Max Manus: Man of War) are more into the getting-there excitement than overly scrutinizing Heyerdahl, his smells-like-a-publicity-stunt journey, or his still-questionable theory. What we don’t mind getting are handsome, and increasingly bronzed and bearded, Scandinavians—with Sverre Hagen channelling Peter O’Toole’s Lawrence of Arabia—facing a possibly disintegrating raft, morale issues, razor-blade reefs, and sharks. Did I mention sharks?

Kon-Tiki also possesses a Life of Pi–like beauty (minus the snoozy aspects). Yes, the mysteries of vast seas, the stars above, and we tiny humans floating in it all still get us. Unless something else gets us first.