The Grey: Facing Death

I'm a cheap bastard when it comes to many things, and so I waited to see The Grey, featuring Liam Neeson, until the movie had debuted at my local Redbox. Based on its previews, I went in expecting to watch something along the lines of Taken, but with wolves as the bad guys. So I expected to see lots of action and for most of the film to feature Liam Neeson awesomely destroying the vicious pack of wolves that was hunting his motley gang of survivors.

I'm going to delve into some establishing story spoilers a few paragraphs down, but before that let me give you a relatively brief summary of my thoughts on the film with a broad thematic spoiler that shouldn't ruin the movie:  This is not a story about Liam Neeson killing wolves. If you watch this movie expecting that, you might come out disappointed. There's some of that, but not much. Instead, The Grey is a story about death and dealing with death. The film takes a while to get to the point where you realize that and the theme finally comes into focus. Would I recommend you take the time to watch the movie? Absolutely. Liam Neeson is reason enough for me to recommend most anything, and that the film ends up being an interesting examination of our relationship with death only adds to that recommendation.

SPOILER WARNING HERE: If you continue to read on then you have no right to complain about spoilers in particular (you're still free to complain about everything else). I'll try to minimize spoilers and won't spoil any of the twists or deaths, but there will be story spoilers. You were warned!

The set-up for our story is that Liam Neeson works somewhere near the cold and icy end of the world with people he claims are unfit for society, guarding the post's inhabitants from wolves with his rifle and Liam Neesoniness. Oh, also, he's sad about his wife, presumably because she's dead. He cannot get her out of his head to the point that he would have committed suicide but for the wolves left to hunt. So, yeah. Conflicted and deep and stuff, I guess? At this point I was still hoping and praying for awesome wolf-slaying action. And there is a quick bit of that, displaying Neeson's competence at his chosen profession. 

Now Liam and a few of his co-workers are traveling on a plane over the barren landscape of snow around them. The plane runs into turbulence, a few of the passengers have basic character traits established, and then the plane crashes in the middle of said barren landscape of snow. In wolf territory. Making the wolves whose territory they've landed in quite angry. In response, the angry wolves start to play a game of pecking away at Liam Neeson's small group of survivors, taking members out one by one.

These men have no working weapons. With but a few supplies and survival items strung across their backs, they have no choice but to flee, and flee they do. But they're fleeing from a pack of wolves who own the territory. Given the weaponless and freezing circumstances that the gang find themselves in, these wolves become an implacable force of death.

How do you deal with that death? God or no God, the movie makes it pretty clear that dying is going to suck pretty bad. Do you fight death with what basic weapons you might possess? Do you run from it as fast as your legs can carry you? Do you pray for a miracle? This question of dealing with death becomes the central theme and story of The Grey. Perhaps some of these characters might make it out of the film alive, but it's certain that along the way many of them are going to die.

There were some superb moments of acting in the film, although no one performance stood out as fantastic for me. Technically, it was competent. Its picture was on the grainy side and its audio design relatively minimalistic, but both were good choices for this story. Again, neither stood out to me as anything particularly special, but nor were they in any way bad. The end, however, is poetry.

Few of our stories confront death this directly, and fewer still take that confrontation as their main focus. The Grey is certainly worth seeing just for eventually executing that focus well, but you'll also have a hard time enjoying it if you're not in the mood to consider the question of death. Also, Liam Neeson.