One should always pay attention to the beginning. This is when the seeds of the end are sown.
Once more into the fray,
Into the last good fight I’ll ever know.
Live and die on this day.
Live and die on this day.
I was a tad under excited about seeing The Grey. It looked like The Edge, except with a bigger Brit saving the day. The previews (BTW I’m going to start researching and paying attention to who throws these trailers and previews together, most today are guilty of 1 of 3 crimes: revealing too much, misrepresenting the story, or just sucking) were for a movie I had already seen. If any of you remember The Edge, its about a plane crash in Alaska after which the survivors are hunted by a big ole bear. Anthony Hopkins defeats the bear with his wits. The preview for The Grey looked like the same movie except instead of AH beating a bear with his brain it was Liam Neeson beating up a wolf with a broken vodka bottle. Not an unentertaining prospect, but not something I absolutely needed to see.
This film was the victim of misrepresentation. It is not a remake of The Edge, though its trailer was. It’s more of a nod to Jack London stories. Most of the film reminded me of To Build a Fire. More on that later.
The basic plot: bunch of miners or oil workers (and one sniper) are working in Assfuck, Alaska and their shift or whatever is over so they get to hop a plane ride to the relative civilization of Anchorage. And after much foreshadowing, the plane crashes into a blank spot on the map somewhere between Assfuck and Anchorage. There are several survivors and there seem to be enough random supplies to make an attempt at survival. Except they have crashed landed on what a large pack of wolves consider their territory. This is bad because wolves give themselves the right to kill/eat/play soccer with the organs of whatever is in their territory.
So not only are these few survivors in what must be at least 30 below 0 (Fahrenheit) blizzard conditions; they are also running from large wolves. And the wolves are pretty cool actually. They have a gift for the dramatic without being too obvious about it. And they know where to stand to look scariest.
But fighting the wolves isn’t really what the film is about. It is about despair in the face of cosmic indifference. This is what recalls To Build a Fire. The terrible cold in that story is described as exposure to the universe at large. Alaska in winter was the cosmos directly touching the earth. And the universe unmasked was the essence of death. When confronted with the indifference of the universe to our pain and suffering, one will question the existence of God, and the point of life. And there are awesome To Build a Fire moments in The Grey. If there is a supposedly benign being in charge of the universe, why won’t he throw me a bone and all that. But eventually, in The Grey, we come to realize that’s not really the point. Liam Neeson and his buddies are confronted with the cold unmasked cosmos and pursued by giant wolves; but the point is: on this corner of a wet rock, in the face of the unrelenting cold of the universe, they and the wolves are together on it.
I’d see this movie if I were you.