Monday, March 5, 2012

Review of the film The Grey

            There are experiences that leave a person unable or unfit for the world as most of us live in it. If these encounters are survived, the survivor is never the person that he or she was before—now unable to step rightly back into the life once led.

            In The Grey, Liam Neeson stars as a man pit against a pack of wolves like none other ever recorded in the existence of man. These wolves are as big as small horses and ruthless hunters of full-grown male humans. They travel long distances and over great obstacles unexplained. These creatures can blend in with the dark and attack from out of nowhere. They are the baddest wolves that have ever lived.
            The later-in-life action star Neeson plays someone we've seen living on the screen before—the dark and lethal man of past mysteries that the actor been racking up lately in tawdry thrillers like Taken and Unknown.  These two elements, the wolves and the loner, together make up what one would expect is a by the numbers adventure thriller. And to some degree it is, but in this adventure thriller there are also some moments of intense emotion that feel as if they could be real.
            In this story, a ragtag handful of men are stranded in the foreboding Alaskan wilderness by a violent plane crash. They are pursued by the aforementioned numberless pack of wolves as they attempt to survive and find help. When it comes right down to the survival aspects of the story, there are some elements and images that many fear—the ice cold wind and snow that form a blinding, stinging blizzard, the dark creatures that may hunt us in the night, the horror of being pinned underwater just out of reach of the surface—and here they are illustrated before you on the screen. Their nature may be rendered in a heightened manner by the magic of big movie production, but they are the some of what each of us dreams of, the nightmares that plague and pull at our imaginations.

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