Journey's End

Once upon a time I saw a movie at BYU's International Cinema. It took place in a medieval village during the black death. As the plague decimated nearby settlements, a boy in the village thought they could dig themselves to safety. And they did, somehow digging their way into a modern (1980's) city. A good portion of the movie then followed the boy and several men from the village as they wandered around this city, out of place and in awe.

I know the plot sounds strange, but I loved the movie. A year or two later, during my first summer in Michigan, I found myself with a Netflix account and I remembered this particular movie and decided it would be fun to find it and watch it again. The problem was that I couldn't remember the name. In fact, I remembered nothing more about the movie than what I described in the paragraph above. I tried googling several permutations of "medieval," "time travel," "black death," "plague," "movie,"  "vikings" (I thought maybe there were vikings involved), and "medieval villagers find themselves in modern city." But I came up with nothing.

My inability to find even the name of the movie transformed it from a nice cinematic memory into a compelling mystery, and now I couldn't stop thinking about it. Every six months or so I'd try new tactics to track it down. I got more creative in my Google searches. I scrolled through an International Cinema film listing. And at long last I got a title: The Navigators, or The Navigators: A Time Travel Odyssey, or The Navigators: A Medieval Odyssey. With that mystery solved, the next mystery was how I could watch it again, and this was a harder one to crack because the movie is surprisingly obscure. Netflix had no copies of the film, and Amazon was selling copies for something like $70. The Ann Arbor District Library, which has an extensive DVD collection, carried several copies of Flight of the Navigator, but not the Navigator that I was looking for.

And then I moved back to Utah, and after I'd been here for months and months I got to thinking about the movie once again and re-checked Netflix (still no copies), and then wondered if the Orem library, which has a largish and sort of haphazard media collection, might carry it. I logged onto the catalog, typed in The Navigator without much hope, and there it was! And of course it was available, because how many other people in the world even know about this movie? I wasted no time in driving to Orem and checking it out.

But almost as soon as I did, I suddenly wasn't sure I wanted to watch it anymore. I've spent well over six years in my quest to find the movie, and in the course of those six years I worry that I've built it up more than it deserves. It might be a Great Gatsby experience, but it also might be a 1984 experience. Sometimes it's great to revisit a memory (whether it's a book or movie or song, or a place, or even a friendship) with different eyes that let you build new memories or experience something in a way that you didn't the first time around. But sometimes there are memories that you want to hold in the past, sacred and undisrupted.

I am going to watch this movie. I can't not watch it after such a long quest. And I'm excited to watch it, too, in spite of my reservations. But whether or not I enjoy the movie as much as I did six or seven years ago, I'm going to feel just a little sense of loss, because the quest is over and I think maybe half the fun was in the quest.

Have you ever gone back to something you loved, only to be disappointed?

I hope that's not what happens here.