Movie Review: The Grey (2012)

It used to be that the only natural environment I was truly scared of was the jungle. Animals and bugs and heat and humidity... there's things in the jungle that you've never even heard of that can kill you. Now after watching The Grey, I'm adding the Alaskan wilderness to the list of places you'll never get me anywhere near. Anyway, The Grey was all kinds of awesome and fantastic, a big highlight for 2012, and one of the best movies I have watched recently.

A plane carrying a group of oil workers crashes in the middle of nowhere during a horrific blizzard in Alaska. Only seven men survive the crash, but though they are alive, they soon find out that being lost and dealing with the extreme weather is probably the least of their worries. A pack of ferocious grey wolves lurk nearby, thwarting the men at almost every turn and picking them off one by one.

So the weird thing is that I didn't really know much about what this movie was about before I saw it. Liam Neeson... snow... wolves... That was kinda all I got. But the not knowing made the experience of watching the movie so much better, as I was wholly unprepared for what was revealed to me on screen. And it wasn't just the scary element of the film that was so surprising, either. The heavy emotional side was also unexpected, and is what helped save the movie from being just a movie about some guys getting eaten by wolves.

Do I even need to write anything about how awesome Liam Neeson is? Well, he is. You know it, everyone knows it. He's not his new "bad ass" self so much in The Grey, although there is a touch of that in the way his character, John Ottway, takes charge of the situation with his wolf knowledge - his job with the oil company was to watch out for and kill wolves so that they did not attack the workers. Ottway is a smart, sincere man with fierce loyalty and morals, things that he seems to pass on to the other men during their ordeal. At the same time, Ottway is also a troubled man whose lost his wife in some way (it is subtly revealed later on just how) and who actually attempts suicide in one of the first scenes, which is in contrast to how hard he fights to survive through the rest of the film. I got the impression that his survival instincts in the beginning of the film were more for the other people's benefit than his own, that he had the knowledge to help them and it was his obligation. That changes as the movie goes on, and Ottway does not want to punk out and kill himself anymore, but rather wants to make a stand and accept his death, however it may come.

In some specific scenes, The Grey was actually a lot scarier to me than some horror films. Like, I was completely stressed out and terrified the whole time I was watching it, not knowing when a wolf was going to attack or when something else might happen to hinder the men's chance of survival. Mostly though - yeah, it was the wolves that were the scariest bits. Still at the site of the plane crash, Ottway is attacked by two of them, and because you know that Neeson is not going to bite it this early, your only thought is how fucking huge these wolves are, and it makes them that much more scary whenever they appear. And there are a surprising number of scenes that almost make you jump out of your skin - the glowing sets of eyes that appear in the dark, the wolf that suddenly appears behind Diaz, the many times that a wolf will jump out of nowhere to attack somebody - all of these scenes are done in an incredibly effective way. The howling of the wolves is also used to create tension and fear in the scenes where the men are around their fire, listening to them in the distance.

The direction by Joe Carnahan is wonderful and beautiful throughout - with such a stunning location, I would have expected nothing less. His style is very arty and he shoots some scenes very differently than you would expect. I loved the scene on the plane right before the crash where the camera moves backward down the aisle and you can see the breaths coming out of each of the men's mouths, which is a very clever and chilling (haha, pun) way of letting the audience know that something bad is about to happen (because it shouldn't be that cold on an airplane). The crash itself is shot in a very realistic and believable way, and all the flashback-daydreamy scenes with Ottway and his wife (and Ottway as a boy with his father) blend seamlessly with the other scenes and don't take you out of the central story like many flashbacks tend to do. The wolves at times looked a little unrealistic but I wasn't exactly expecting to see real wolves in the same shot with an actor anyway, so that can be forgiven.

As a thrilling tale of emotion and survival, The Grey succeeds beautifully. Liam Neeson and the rest of the cast all portray very likable guys in the most horrible of situations, each fighting like hell to not only survive but to hang on to that which was most important in their lives during their ordeal. Many people will probably watch the movie just for Neeson (in a way, I kinda did) but they will get so much more than they thought - a truly beautiful and engaging movie that holds your heart and your breath right until the very end.


Also, speaking of the end, a word of advice - stay tuned after the credits.