Wolf Awareness Week II: Day 6

 

The Grey

2011

D: Joe Carnahan

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Pros: Good direction, Visuals, Some good lines

Cons: General story’s been done before, Inaccuracies about wolves, Anticlimactic finale

      Joe Carnahan’s Smokin’ Aces wasn’t quite the action-filled comedy its trailers promised to be, but it was still an interesting and distinctive movie.  I wish I could say the same thing for The Grey, which also seemed to suffer from misleading marketing.  I thought Taken was not much more than a generic Bourne wannabe, but Liam Neeson proved to be a credibly gritty action hero in it, and the movie spawned a series of Liam Neeson action films.  With The Grey, Hollywood seemed to be unleashing him on wildlife, but the film turned out to be different from what people expected.

      The film begins in an Alaskan oilfield that employs John Ottway (Liam Neeson) to shoot wolves in order to protect the workers.  This doesn’t make much sense because, while wolves will raid peoples’ farms for livestock, they know better than to attack humans directly.  Despite this, we see Ottway shooting a lone wolf that attempts to rush a small group of oilmen, an occurrence that I suspect would never happen unless it was rabid or really desperate for food.  Afterwards, Ottway writes a letter to his estranged wife Ana (Anne Openshaw), who occasionally appears to him in dreams telling him not to be afraid, and attempts to commit suicide, but he changes his mind when he hears a wolf’s howl.

      The next day he boards a plane with a bunch of oilmen (Dermot Mulroney, Frank Grillo, Dallas Roberts, Joe Anderson, Nonso Anozie, James Badge Dale), but the plane crashes in the wilderness, leaving a miraculous number of them alive, including Ottway himself.  Finding out that his gun is broken beyond repair, he tries to organize the other survivors and faces some tension from the closest thing this movie has to another character.  Diaz’s (Frank Grillo) attempt to loot the dead bodies may be questionable, but it certainly doesn’t warrant Ottway’s threat of physical and potentially lethal violence.  However, our merry travelers have a bigger problem on their hands: wolves.  And not just any wolves.  These poor bastards seemed to have stumbled into a nest of Africanized wolves, because these things are total psychos.

     The movie’s depiction of lupine behavior might be appropriately described as…well…pure bullshit.  These wolves insistently pursue this group of humans despite not apparently getting much out of them.  Wolves are animals, but they act with rationality in regards to their survival.  Obsessing over a group of humans seems to be a bad way to do that.  You wonder why they don’t give up this apparently high-risk quarry or even take a break to take care of their young.  Instead, they chase down the oilmen, killing a couple, but mostly just menacing them ineffectually.  More men die as an indirect result of their actions, succumbing to hypoxia, drowning or gravity.  Ottway, who apparently has a store of erroneous wolf trivia, exposits that the wolves have a hunting radius of 300 miles.  Now if this was true, and if wolves were as ridiculously territorial as they are depicted in the movie, then Alaska and Canada would only have room for 11 packs:

 Assuming all of these packs have 42 wolves in them (which is an extremely generous estimate) that would make the entire population of wolves in North America about 462.  But then again, in this movie Canada could be the size of Neptune for all I know.  
      I know that some people might respond to this criticism by saying that I'm missing the point of the movie.  I would say that you could have made the movie just as good at what it was without this distracting amount of factual inaccuracies meant solely to serve the plot.  You could still have the same things even with more effort put into the writing to avoid this buffoonery.  It also sends a mixed message in regards to the uncaring nature of the wild if you make a group of animals unrealistically aggressive.  I'm also sure that the implausibility of all those people surviving such a horrific plane crash, combined with the absurdity of what follows (ignoring the wolf attack in the first scene), would provoke many to play the "Owl Creek Bridge" Card (i.e. most of the plot is the fantasy of a dying man).  Personally, I find this trope to be trite when used as knee-jerk headcanon, especially without the novely, edge and eloquent cynicism of Ambrose Bierce's short story.  

      Aside from the inaccuracies, there is one moment that might disturb animal lovers.   At one point, the oilmen manage to kill the Omega and they decide to eat it.  In a very questionable decision, the filmmakers decided to “prepare” the actors for this scene by feeding them actual wolf meat (frozen,not raw), which Neeson apparently liked.  I’m not an animal rights activist, but I might say that feeding a sentient creature to actors just so that a character can say he doesn’t think wolves taste good is overkill.

      While being haunted by these creatures, the oilmen are killed off one by one in rather pointless ways.  I know that’s kind of the point in this type of story, but there’s no challenge or impact in this if we don’t sympathize with the characters.  They’re all just like horror movie fodder with the exception of Ottway.  There’s a reason why the movie poster is nothing but Liam Neeson’s face; it’s all about him.  In fact he gets all the good lines, though Diaz occasionally tries.  When I hear him utter an attempt at a one-liner as cringeworthy as “I got a book.  It’s called We’re All Fucked.  It’s a bestseller” and “This is fucked city. Population: five and dwindling,” it becomes painfully clear that the movie really, really wants me to like him.  Note to potential writers: one-dimensional snarky characters only work if you can actually write clever things for them to say.  The men stop for a moment to discuss spirituality, and (surprise) Diaz is a cynical atheist.  Ottway also says that he is an atheist, but he wishes he could be a believer.  He tells the men about his father (James Bitonti, with Jonathan Bitonti appearing as a young Ottway) and a poem he wrote about facing every day like a battle for survival.  After this important exposition is out of the way, a little more wandering and dying is done until Diaz decides he’s had enough of the former and sits down to let the wolves or the cold take him.  Ottway continues with the remaining redshirt, who immediately dies in a tragically pointless manner.  Left alone, he angrily cries out to an uncaring or nonexistent God, and soon stumbles into wolves’ den.  It turns out that the men have been getting closer to it the whole time, but then again why didn’t the wolves simply circle around them to get between them and their home? 

       In the final climactic scene, Ottway realizes that the wolves have surrounded him and he challenges the Alpha, who acknowledges with a really good Kubrick Stare.

As he prepares for battle, he thinks of his wife, now predictably revealed to have died of a terminal illness.  He recites his father’s poem as a poor man’s substitute for a John Murphy score swells up.  He tapes mini liquor bottles between his fingers and smashes them open.  Now we finally get to see the climactic final battle that the trailer practically promised us: Liam Neeson punching wolves in the face with broken liquor bottles.  He begins to charge, and…that’s when the movie cuts to credits.  Practically the same time as when the trailer cut.  I mean the ending isn’t bad per se, but considering what I was expecting.  I mean I was expecting to see Liam Neeson punching wolves in the face, and that’s something Twilight delivered on.  This is really more of the fault of the marketing rather than the movie itself.  The movie truly ends with a brief mid-credits shot of Ottway and the Alpha lying on each other, exhausted and possibly dying from an even fight. 

     At its heart, The Grey is actually a pretty generic tragic/survival story, without much to set it apart from its brethren aside from the false promise of Liam Neeson action and zoology so profoundly inaccurate Doug Walker would pick up on it.  People die without point, as they do in real life.  Odds are stacked against hapless protagonists with no relief.  It’s a type of story that has done many times before many times better.  Its position on the existence of God seems ambiguous and open to interpretation, but the movie was apparently marketed toward Christian audiences.  Then again, that could have just been cynicism.  It seems that God helps those who help themselves in this story, and that man must fight to survive as any other animal would.  The movie’s main theme seems to be to never give up fighting till the day you die, and I quite frankly thought that Paul Stanley conveyed that message more effectively.

     Perhaps the best part of the movie, aside from some of Neeson’s dialogue, is the visual style.  Cinematography is great, and the depiction of North America’s taiga during wintertime is beautiful.  A lot of this may be due to the involvement of producer Ridley Scott.  In fact, this $25,000,000 film looks far better than more expensive CGI fare.  My favorite part was special effects work on the wolves themselves.  Greg Nicotero deserves a lot of credit for the animatronic work he coordinated on these creatures.  CGI was used sparingly, mostly for touch-ups.  If you look at production stills of the puppets, they do look a little fake, but you don’t see that onscreen thank to the clever lighting and camerawork.  It reminds me of things like Bruce from Jaws or the Xenomorph from Alien.  Filmmakers using their wits to work around problems and create thrills rather than allowing the machines to think for them.  It’s good to see that’s not a lost art.  The alpha in particular has an air to him that almost makes him seem like a character himself.  They not only look realistic (with the help of great camerawork), but also very sinister and expressive.  There are plenty of great shots of them in the darkness where we see only their glowing eyes and their breath.  The movie may not be great, but it is something to look at.  The directing style really does redeem the movie, and makes it effectively tense and emotional despite its lackluster writing.  Like The Dark Knight Rises, The Grey is very watchable and engaging due to its spectacle, but you don’t really like it when you’re not actually watching it        

         

            

MEMORABLE QUOTES    

[Diaz is trying to loot the dead bodies after the plane crash]

OTTWAY: I'm going to start beating the shit out of you in the next five seconds. And you're going to swallow a lot of blood for a fucking billfold.

OTTWAY: We're going to get a large branch and sharpen the end of it, and we're going to shove it up this thing's ass. Then we're going to eat it.

OTTWAY: My dad was not without love... but a cliched Irish motherfucker when he wanted to be. Drinker, brawler, all that stuff. Never shed a tear. Saw weakness everywhere. But he had this thing for poems... poetry. Reading them, quoting them. Probably thought it rounded him off, you know. His way of apologizing, I guess. And there was one that hung over the desk in his den. It was only when I was a lot older, I realized he had written it. It was untitled, four lines. I read it at his funeral. "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."

     

OTTWAY: Do something. Do something. You phony prick fraudulent motherfucker. Do something! Come on! Prove it! Fuck faith! EARN IT!!! Show me something real! I need it now. Not later. Now! Show me and I'll believe in you until the day I die. I swear. I'm calling on you. I'm calling on you! [pause] Fuck it, I’ll do it myself.