Movie Time: The Grey

This Week's movie was The Grey, starring Liam Neeson.

Taken, now with wolves!

Don't you just love it when you go see a movie with certain expectations, and then find out you were wrong about the movie? I do, especially when the movie exceeds my expectations. I was kind of expecting a regular old "people stuck in the wilderness, they survive on grit and courage alone", but instead, I got The Grey, a movie about Life, Death, Redemption and with wolves somewhere, but they're only important as a framing mechanism. And it's great, it's really working great, it's a tense movie that explores themes very well, with characters that feel real, even if sometimes the wolves don't.

In a Nutshell

Liam Neeson works for an oil company in deep Alaska to kill wolves while the workers toil. He has lost his wife, is alone and without a will to live. However, a plane crash he survives changes all that, putting the lives of the few survivors in his hands as wolves attack the intruders in their hunting grounds. Leading the survivors towards what he feels might be salvation, they are picked off one by one, all the while, the themes of life, death, their meanings and consequences are discussed candidly by men about to die, alone and cold in the Alaskan wilds.

The Rant

I don't have a lot to rant against here, i really enjoyed this movie, and the only real flaw is that, in some scenes, the wolves looked really fake. i don't know if they were CG, enhanced by CG or what, but they seemed fake. On the other hand, the wolves are often not seen at all, but merely made their presence felt, which was very unsettling. I liked the parallels between the wolves and the survivors, how it was made clear that, in order to survive, they needed to become wilder, more like wolves, but still clinging to their humanity.

I liked that no character was safe, that from point one, people died. in the crash, from wolves, characters were often developed and killed off without warning,either unable to go on or succumbing to an accident or their own failings. And yet, the movie did not feel distastefully morbid, the way death was treated in this film was very interesting. The way we see so many people die on screen, and yet it never felt gratuitous. It's always foreshadowed, the survivors are all, in a way, dead men walking.

There were a lot of very nice, unexpected scares. At some point after the plane crash, there's one obvious jump scare building, it's the only one you get in the movie. Every other scare is unexpected, or, rather, not telegraphed. A lot of times, you feel like everything is going to be more or less okay, but then BAM! everything goes wrong so quickly, it's startling, and it's something I feel we don't see often enough in movies. It's like in conventional American cinema, startlings and jump scares need to be telegraphed. Not in The Grey. After all, wolves don't announce that they're going to maul you beforehand.

Lastly (I shouldn't have waited this long before reviewing), I guess I liked the ending, even though a lot of people may find it unsatisfying. I feel that it really worked amazingly, it really, in a way, summarized the entire movie, and without really showing anything, just letting us understand how it ends while the credits roll. A sort of... natural ending, I guess i'd call it? One that doesn't need to be shown to be understood, one that really summarizes the whole film by itself. And the scene after the credits really makes it seem like the credits covered the rest of the ending, letting us play it in our heads. Like I said, some might find it unsatisfying, I found it perfect. 'Course, it's not a good ending, but it's the one the film needed.

The Score

The Grey was a very entertaining, surprisingly deep movie where the titular wolves are not the main attraction but a framing mechanism, a means to have the story move forward. it's a movie about people, not wolves. I give it a "Surprisingly deep" out of 10.