Thoughts On The Grey

"Once more into the fray. Into the last fight I'll ever know. Live and die on this day. Live and die on this day."

This post is spoiler-ridden. You've been warned. 

This poem from Liam Nesson's latest film "The Grey" echoed far deeper as the movie progressed. Nesson plays a wolf hunter who protects employees of a petroleum company in Alaska from wolf attack while working on the pipeline. The movie plays out as if you were reading a novel, fitting because this was based on the short story Ghost Walker by Ian Mc'Kenzie Jeffers. It tells a tale of a man who's battle with nature and beast is an outward manifestation of the battle within his soul.

After a harrowing plan crash, Nesson and several other survivors, find that living through the crash allowed them to enter a new nightmare. They begin to be harassed by a pack of grey wolves. From the first death in the movie you see that the main character has a unique perspective on death. Maybe it was the suicide attempt that was alluded to in the beginning of the movie or maybe it was the death of his wife who visits him in his dreams. 

Once he held the shredded body of one of his companions, looked in his eyes and led him to the afterlife, I knew that I was watching something more than just a character death. You see a man who has walked that valley before, who has seen the face of death as it crept into his life, but that death wasn't coming for him, not yet. That death came for someone he cared deeply for. He recognized the fear in that persons eyes and knew exactly what to say to make that fearful transition as peaceful as possible.

As the story goes on I wondered as to why Nesson's character is fighting so hard to cling to survival. It seemed that as each of his companions died, his resolve to live began to grow.  It culminated to a powerful scene in which Nesson screams out into the heavens looking for God in the frozen hell that he is in. Wondering and hoping that those cries will be answered, but no answer comes. Regardless of the lack of response from this unseen God, the movie heads toward the inevitable fight with the alpha wolf of the pack.

This film was beyond what I expected. After the trailers I had thought that this would be a movie like Anthony Hopkins' "The Edge". But it was more than just a movie about survival, it was a movie about life. It was a film that asks us to re-examine the battles that we go through in this life and gets us looking deep inside at what truly keeps us going.