The Grey ... and inevitable related stuff
Mar. 12th, 2012 05:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tealinAs I mentioned in my previous post, I saw The Grey for 100% genuine authentic work purposes last week. I figure I might as well throw a review up here, if for nothing else than practise, as it's been out for a while ...
For those not in the know, it is a film about a group of guys whose plane crashes in remote snowy wilderness and they try to get to civilisation while not getting eaten by wolves. I've always been a little partial to the survival genre, though haven't sought out much of it voluntarily; it's sort of like Alternate History in that I forget I like it until I read/watch it by chance, and then forget again. Anyway. The story was pretty basic (it really doesn't go much beyond what I just laid out) but it was gripping from beginning to end, starting with a verywell-terrifyingly-shot plane crash, so I suppose the movie filled its mandate if it was a thriller.
But was it? It occupied a certain inbetweeniness that could have gone a number of ways: it wasn't just about making you jump (though there were good jumps) because there were long stretches of relative tedium and not everything was milked for scares that could have been. It didn't feel like a straight-up survival story (though there was a lot of that) because there were a number of things that were either glossed over or stretched credulity, but it wasn't so far outside reality for these things not to matter so much. The wolves' role in the plot, for one, bends reality a little bit; they aren't a completely accurate biological portrait of Canis lupus, but neither are they clearly symbolic in a way that would make biology irrelevant. It could have been a character piece, except that the only character that gets examined in much depth is the lead and even then it's pretty subtle. The characters were a little hard to get into because they're all rough-and-ready oil workers and the sort of people I have a very hard time relating to ... but by all rights I shouldn't be able to relate to the crew of an early-19th-century frigate, and yet I like each and every man on the Surprise (even Capt Howard!), so it should be possible to bring out their fundamental humanity and make them lovable somehow, even through the cloud of testosterone and f-bombs. (BTW, if swearing bothers you, don't watch this movie – it's done very comfortably and naturally so it doesn't grate, like some movies do, but I don't think it's possible to find five solid minutes without some seriously blue language.) But despite a basic ability to care about the characters I found it hard to like any of them.
It wasn't quite artistic enough to be an art film, it wasn't quite frightening or psychological or gothic enough to be horror, it wasn't 'big' enough to be an epic nor small enough to be intimate ... it didn't even find a comfortable place between 'genre film' and 'genre-bending new perspective'. Or maybe I just couldn't find a comfortable way to sit in my chair and projected a lot onto it, I don't know.
I found myself wishing that it was a little less jumpy and a little more survival-y, that the wolves were more of a constant background threat than something that actually came onscreen every so often, and that the characters were more varied and more interesting ... but then I realised I was basically wishing I were watching The Way Back instead, and if I wanted that movie I could very well go home and watch it. The Grey on its own terms is ... well, grey. Not bad, not vague, not here nor there, just ... grey. This could be a strength or a weakness depending on personal taste, and your ability to weather the swearing.
Anyway, inevitable comparisons came up in my mind, and it got me thinking. I'm sure everyone who knows me is by now heartily sick of me telling them I'm not freezing to death in Antarctica, when they ask me how I'm doing,* but how would people who were in such a situation inject a dose of wryly optimistic perspective? I mean, what's worse than freezing to death in Antarctica?
*In the interest of journalistic integrity, this statement rarely comes in answer to 'how are you' but rather at the end of a long angsty conversation about the state of the industry/studio/department and the woes therein. It's important to remember how small our worries are.
For those not in the know, it is a film about a group of guys whose plane crashes in remote snowy wilderness and they try to get to civilisation while not getting eaten by wolves. I've always been a little partial to the survival genre, though haven't sought out much of it voluntarily; it's sort of like Alternate History in that I forget I like it until I read/watch it by chance, and then forget again. Anyway. The story was pretty basic (it really doesn't go much beyond what I just laid out) but it was gripping from beginning to end, starting with a very
But was it? It occupied a certain inbetweeniness that could have gone a number of ways: it wasn't just about making you jump (though there were good jumps) because there were long stretches of relative tedium and not everything was milked for scares that could have been. It didn't feel like a straight-up survival story (though there was a lot of that) because there were a number of things that were either glossed over or stretched credulity, but it wasn't so far outside reality for these things not to matter so much. The wolves' role in the plot, for one, bends reality a little bit; they aren't a completely accurate biological portrait of Canis lupus, but neither are they clearly symbolic in a way that would make biology irrelevant. It could have been a character piece, except that the only character that gets examined in much depth is the lead and even then it's pretty subtle. The characters were a little hard to get into because they're all rough-and-ready oil workers and the sort of people I have a very hard time relating to ... but by all rights I shouldn't be able to relate to the crew of an early-19th-century frigate, and yet I like each and every man on the Surprise (even Capt Howard!), so it should be possible to bring out their fundamental humanity and make them lovable somehow, even through the cloud of testosterone and f-bombs. (BTW, if swearing bothers you, don't watch this movie – it's done very comfortably and naturally so it doesn't grate, like some movies do, but I don't think it's possible to find five solid minutes without some seriously blue language.) But despite a basic ability to care about the characters I found it hard to like any of them.
It wasn't quite artistic enough to be an art film, it wasn't quite frightening or psychological or gothic enough to be horror, it wasn't 'big' enough to be an epic nor small enough to be intimate ... it didn't even find a comfortable place between 'genre film' and 'genre-bending new perspective'. Or maybe I just couldn't find a comfortable way to sit in my chair and projected a lot onto it, I don't know.
I found myself wishing that it was a little less jumpy and a little more survival-y, that the wolves were more of a constant background threat than something that actually came onscreen every so often, and that the characters were more varied and more interesting ... but then I realised I was basically wishing I were watching The Way Back instead, and if I wanted that movie I could very well go home and watch it. The Grey on its own terms is ... well, grey. Not bad, not vague, not here nor there, just ... grey. This could be a strength or a weakness depending on personal taste, and your ability to weather the swearing.
Anyway, inevitable comparisons came up in my mind, and it got me thinking. I'm sure everyone who knows me is by now heartily sick of me telling them I'm not freezing to death in Antarctica, when they ask me how I'm doing,* but how would people who were in such a situation inject a dose of wryly optimistic perspective? I mean, what's worse than freezing to death in Antarctica?
*In the interest of journalistic integrity, this statement rarely comes in answer to 'how are you' but rather at the end of a long angsty conversation about the state of the industry/studio/department and the woes therein. It's important to remember how small our worries are.
