OK gents, let’s not get what my wife calls “agitato” about a flik. It is a borderline topic here but as long as we can have some fun with it and don’t drive one another’s blood pressure up, what the heck. In a weird conjunction of input on this topic (I read the NYT review this morning and watched the clip just minutes ago), I was just reading the three posts above while listening to NPR news in the background … when suddenly there’s the director of “The Grey” doing an interview and attempting to explain that if we pay attention, this is not just another “man versus killer wildlife” film, but has a deeper layer, namely, exploring how men, males, deal with fear of death. Liam’s character apparently is a pragmatic man with no supernatural faith and is dealing with the recent death of his wife. He believes in what his senses tell him. Another in the group is very religious. Etc. These topics get brought out in campfire conversation and more subtly via lines and actions in the flick – this examination of how different men, with varying degrees of macho, religion, etc., deal with extreme threat of danger, prolonged fear, and a fear or even conviction of pending death. Is there an afterlife or will my “afterlife” be limited to bones in wolf scat? The NPR interviewer said, as a compliment, “This movie is no more about wolves than Moby Dick is about whales.”
And so on — that’s how the director is hoping it will be perceived, his intent, and so far all the bigtime reviewers are being pretty generous. And Liam Neeson is not your usual Bigfoot Killer Grizz low-end actor. Yet, from what I saw in the preview, I don’t think I’ll be seeing it at a theater and may or may not when it comes out in DVD. For one thing, I’m not much of a movie guy (nor novels either). For another, this clearly ain’t no Moby Dick. I do think it’s a cut above, or several cuts above, the usual “killer this or that” flick, but it still functions to distance man from the rest of nature and promote outright BS. Wolf packs sometimes follow people, sometimes quite close (I have some close subsistence-trapper friends in deep-bush AK, and also Val Geist on civilized Vancouver Island, who have experienced this) but it appears mere curiosity. The idea that a pack of glowing-eyed wolves would stalk a group of stranded humans for the purpose of killing and eating them has NO basis in reality. And that part I too resent. Now, if they’d had ARnie with them he could have made a bow from natural materials that shoots through large trees, as he did in Predator, which is among my favorite cult-camp fliks.
