When The Grey came out early this year it was widely regarded as a stereotypical, hyper-masculinized, adventure film and these descriptions are accurate at the most basic level. The movie features seven male survivors of a plane crash in the wilds of Alaska who have to battle ferocious wolves, a cold, passionless nature, and their own memories and personal failures in order to avoid being eaten. The rationale for the wolf attacks, that wolves will indiscriminately murder any outsider encroaching the thirty mile radius of their den, was clearly made up by the film’s writer and director, Joe Carnahan, in order to create action, and the film oscillates between wolves as they really are or might be, and wolves as mythological murder-beasts. This, of course, is part of the movie’s intention and draw, and it makes for some genuinely eerie and frightening scenes. Ultimately, however, the survival exploits comes off as contrived, and it is not giving too much away to say that the men slowly die off throughout the duration of the film. Despite these faults, I found The Grey enjoyable, but I would have loved it at fourteen, with its constant cursing, raucous fist-fights, callous descriptions of...
