The Grey

Agreed, but still looking forward to this... it's been a passion project of Carnahan's for years, so I hope it's worth the wait
 
They're called knuckledusters. I think there's another street name for them, but I can't remember what it is. In any case, Liam is a damn badass.


hi-res-liam-neeson-bare-knuckle-wolf-action-600x399.jpg
 
I know what they are, but it just leaves me wondering what the reality level of the movie is meant to be. If you were a practical Oil Driller in a survival situation surely you'd just attach the broken bottles and bits of metal to the end of a large stick when fending off the local wildlife. I'd expect them to be attached to your knuckles if you were, for instance, in the universe that Jean Claude van Damme movies inhabit, or something.
 
I cut some promos for this a few weeks back so I got an early look at it. Loved it. It's very much the sort of gritty yet poetic movie I aspire to make.
 
Well, my comments might not be welcome ...

This is a 3/10 movie that I'll bump to a 5/10 because Liam brings some emotion to the role. Sadly, most of that emotion is carried over from his private off-screen life -- the script is too much of a mess to give him anything to work with.

The survival skills on display are laughable, but let's accept that this isn't a movie about real cold, or real wolves, or anything else real -- its a movie about man against himself, with a giant fantasy Cujo wolf thrown in because they wanted a title hook. The wolf is absurd, not just in performance but in lack there-of ... you can pretty much count on the wolves to come and go at whim, to succeed and fail randomly ... And the story is no Cujo, the bar is too low even for a King formula throwaway.

Not much on display here. The whole thing has a largely grey and grim look, which may be appropriate, and in tried and true no budget fashion big scenes are shot in extreme close up so you can't see much, or in the dark ... same reason. Everybody gets their two minutes of monologue, usually to set up their death scene -- sorry, I guess that's a spoiler, but really! -- and when its all said and done you'll wish you'd seen Haywire instead.

Cheeers,
GB
 
- The wolves not being shown every five seconds gives them power and fear -- we don't fear something we can see clearly for five minutes straight in broad daylight. I'm sure budget factored in, but I really didn't notice this.

- Haywire has a 43% audience rating, The Grey has a 72%. I personally liked Haywire, despite the fact that it's one of the worst-shot movies I've ever seen out of Hollywood, but the film's got nothing on The Grey.
 
Man, I hated Haywire. Terrible cinematography. The lighting was awful and the camera placement and moves actually detracted from the intensity of the scenes. But this thread is about The Grey, and I was pleasantly surprised by that one.
 
Michael Traven said:
- The wolves not being shown every five seconds gives them power and fear -- we don't fear something we can see clearly for five minutes straight in broad daylight. I'm sure budget factored in, but I really didn't notice this.

- Haywire has a 43% audience rating, The Grey has a 72%. I personally liked Haywire, despite the fact that it's one of the worst-shot movies I've ever seen out of Hollywood, but the film's got nothing on The Grey.
Click to expand...

Hey you like what you like. I'm confident my opinion stands, but then I'm also astounded that the IMDb community chooses the thoroughly ordinary Shawshank Redemption as the Greatest Film of All Time -- popular appeal is just that, not necessarily critical acclaim.

I haven't seen Haywire -- I just walked out of The Grey wishing I'd picked the film on the next screen over ...

As for your detail on the wolves, in my neck of the woods, where wolves actually exist -- they only caused snickering, which rose to guffaws when they were outrun. Hatless and gloveless in minus 40 degree temperatures -- that'd kill you in a matter of hours, trust me that's what my theatre's audience was thinking. As would jumping in a river! But if largely not showing them made them more powerful and fearful to you, who am I to argue. Me, I was more impressed with their amazing climbing skills ...

Cheers!
 
I know the film isn't the most realistic, I didn't expect it to be. It's from the guy who directed The A-Team... <wink>

But I've found I can suspend my disbelief a good bit more than most people, with most films anyway. If a film's got style and emotion, I can let the specifics of the story slide; The Grey had a lot of style and I actually felt a lot of sympathy for Ottway.

*MAJOR SPOILERS*
What happens, though, if you presume/pretend that Ottway really did pull the trigger in that early suicide scene, and that everything else -- the plane, the crash, the wolves, the cold, the cliff, the river, the last stand -- was all metaphor for Ottway's struggle against his own inner darkness? If the wolves are merely an externalization for Ottway's spiritual turmoil, does the film become more credible, for lack of a better word?
*/SPOILERS*


Right there with you on Shawshank -- really didn't get what was so amazing about that film.

-JMT
 
I agree that Liam brings something to the role -- I bumped it two stars because of him! -- but I also accept, somewhat uncomfortably, that a lot of what he brings is the tragedy of his personal life, which is not incidentally paralleled in the films narrative ...

I'm all for films that punch above their weight -- Hannah, for instance, I thought a charming revisionist take on the action flick. Not in the least realistic, or 'believable' ... but fun & relatively consistent in its own crazy logic. The Grey failed me on those same things, and I was left feeling that the movie would have been for me more satisfying without the wolves -- man against an unforgiving nature could have got the same story done, I'd suggest, without inventing a 'wolf culture' that exists only in a writers imagination. Jaws this is not! Nor even, as I hinted earlier, is it Cujo. But I give it five, which in my code means a toss up whether you'll be satisfied or not. And if weren't for Liam, it would sit firmly at three. Just my humble opinion.

Cheers,
GB
 
Saw it last night. I didn't go into it with any pre-conceptions other than a couple of reviews I read on Fandango as I was figuring out which movie to watch (the most helpful review said to stay until after the credits to see the final scene).

I loved the opening scenes and felt as though they captured Ottway's inner turmoil really well. But things fell apart for my pretty quickly after the crash. I kept hearing my inner voice say, "I want to believe this could be real but there's just no way." Every time I was about to forget that I was watching a movie, something happened to remind me.

I can suspend reality pretty easily when I know it's not supposed to be a realistic movie. But I have a hard time suspending reality when I think the movie is supposed to be realistic. Right or wrong, I thought this was supposed to be realistic.

On a technical front, I thought there was a ton of ugly noise on some of the early night/fire-lit shots. It's the first time I've ever been completely distracted by stuff like that.
 
I went in knowing is was about Liam Neeson vs Wolves, so I thought I'd just be enjoying a fun film about survival. However what I got was a lot more. A beautiful film with very intense moments that served as something deeper. While the wolves acted a bit more strategically than I would expect them to really be, I enjoyed how the wolves and the survivors were mirrors of each other.

Now mind you it may not have been very believable because of how the wolves acted, and the obvious lack of concern for the cold, but they didn't ignore the cold. They got cold, they had to find ways to keep warm, and there were obvious signs of frostbite on all of them. Didn't one of them freeze over-night and never wake up, the one with the hypoxia? Now one could argue that they should have been in a much more dire situation with the cold, but we don't know what the temperatures they experienced actually were. Plus in the trees they would have been protected by the windchill which is always the big factor in cold climates.
 
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