A review by Brooks Rich
We now come to the end of our brief look at Joe Carnahan for forgotten film Friday. We have arrived at his best film hands down, The Grey. Despite the box office success of this film, and it's high critical consensus, I still think it is not as popular as it should be. This is Joe Carnahan's masterpiece. A startlingly bleak look at what it means to survive and face our own mortality. Moviegoers went into this film thinking it would be Taken with wolves after seeing Liam Neeson and wolves in the trailer. Yeah, that's not what this film is at all.
Liam Neeson is John Ottway, a man who kills wolves for an Alaskan oil company to keep the workers safe. On a plane trip back home, a storm crashes the plane and a handful of survivors are left stranded on the frozen tundra. What's worse? A pack of wolves is not happy to have this human encroachment and start to pick off the men, one at a time. Ottway eventually becomes the leader of the group, determined to get the remaining men to safety.
This might sound like a story you've heard before – man versus nature – and in the end – man overcomes the odds and shows how badass he is. Not so much in The Grey. This film is about this group of men, one by one accepting, and coming to terms with their mortality. Death is approaching from all sides – the cold, the wind, the wolves – and each of the men must come to peace with himself. These are cookie cutter Hollywood characters. These are men who've had tough breaks in life. They are not glamorous. They are just regular blue collar guys, some with shady pasts.
What's interesting is Ottway wanted to kill himself at the start of the film. We see him struggle with his desire to commit suicide during the course of the action. But once the choice is taken away from him, he wants to live more than anyone else.
Carnahan's direction in this film is brilliant. First of all, it has, maybe, the best plane crash in cinema. That entire scene is a tense on the edge of your seat moment. After that Carnahan makes you feel not only the cold but also the isolation the men face. It's just these men facing a bleak, dead, frozen landscape with a pack of hungry predators roaming around. The hopelessness of the situation comes through pretty quick – yet the men keep pushing on, mainly due to the encouragement from Ottway. It all leads to a powerful and haunting ending.
This is one of the best movies of the past ten years. It is a shame Carnahan hasn't really captured the glory he had with this film. I hope we'll see another brilliant movie like this from him in the future. Seek this movie out immediately if you haven't seen it.
We now come to the end of our brief look at Joe Carnahan for forgotten film Friday. We have arrived at his best film hands down, The Grey. Despite the box office success of this film, and it's high critical consensus, I still think it is not as popular as it should be. This is Joe Carnahan's masterpiece. A startlingly bleak look at what it means to survive and face our own mortality. Moviegoers went into this film thinking it would be Taken with wolves after seeing Liam Neeson and wolves in the trailer. Yeah, that's not what this film is at all.
Liam Neeson is John Ottway, a man who kills wolves for an Alaskan oil company to keep the workers safe. On a plane trip back home, a storm crashes the plane and a handful of survivors are left stranded on the frozen tundra. What's worse? A pack of wolves is not happy to have this human encroachment and start to pick off the men, one at a time. Ottway eventually becomes the leader of the group, determined to get the remaining men to safety.
This might sound like a story you've heard before – man versus nature – and in the end – man overcomes the odds and shows how badass he is. Not so much in The Grey. This film is about this group of men, one by one accepting, and coming to terms with their mortality. Death is approaching from all sides – the cold, the wind, the wolves – and each of the men must come to peace with himself. These are cookie cutter Hollywood characters. These are men who've had tough breaks in life. They are not glamorous. They are just regular blue collar guys, some with shady pasts.
What's interesting is Ottway wanted to kill himself at the start of the film. We see him struggle with his desire to commit suicide during the course of the action. But once the choice is taken away from him, he wants to live more than anyone else.
Carnahan's direction in this film is brilliant. First of all, it has, maybe, the best plane crash in cinema. That entire scene is a tense on the edge of your seat moment. After that Carnahan makes you feel not only the cold but also the isolation the men face. It's just these men facing a bleak, dead, frozen landscape with a pack of hungry predators roaming around. The hopelessness of the situation comes through pretty quick – yet the men keep pushing on, mainly due to the encouragement from Ottway. It all leads to a powerful and haunting ending.
This is one of the best movies of the past ten years. It is a shame Carnahan hasn't really captured the glory he had with this film. I hope we'll see another brilliant movie like this from him in the future. Seek this movie out immediately if you haven't seen it.
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