Adventure on Film: Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey
Under a fearsome black-and-white moon, a boy, perhaps twelve, enters a fever dream of 
orange-fired torches whirling down infinite chasms, of men clambering up a towering church steeple, of skies moving too quickly for thought. The boy’s careworn, grubby face melts into black and white rippling water, and the nightmare — if nightmare it is — comes to a sudden end.
Welcome to Fourteenth Century Cumbria, a snowy, monochromatic waste, all bare rock and snowdrifts and blackwater lakes. In a hardscrabble mining village, young Griffin, plagued by his apocalyptic visions, waits for his idol, Connor, to return from a visit to the wider world. But even before Connor’s return, all talk is of death, for the Plague is come, marching inexorably closer. The villagers quickly convince themselves that only a holy quest can save them, and on the slimmest of evidence — Griffin’s disjointed prognostications — Connor, Griffin and four other men set off, bound for a mineshaft so deep (it is said) that it leads straight to the other side of the world. Griffin’s band brings a copper cross that they hope to mount to a titanic cathedral as an offering, a Cumbrian plea to stave off death itself.
Griffin finds the mineshaft right enough, together with a mechanical battering ram with which the men bore a hole to the far side of reality. And what do they find once there? Twentieth century New Zealand.
