Grizzly Man (2005)

This film had the potential to be great, if things had been done differently. Although, of course, that is just my opinion. I know people who have enjoyed this film and would give it a much better rating than I, so why have I only given it a 2/5?

It's because the film dragged. By about the halfway mark, Herzog was losing me. I was bored, and I thought the documentary had already given all that it had to give. It had given us interviews with friends, it had given us footage of Treadwell out in the wild with his beloved bears, and most importantly, it had given us information about how the story ended: with Treadwell being killed and eaten by a bear. It had already gone into this in depth, with gruesome images and so forth. By the time I began to get bored, I was eagerly anticipating the film's end.

I felt that most of the second half of the film could have been cut out. If this had been the case, my review would be much more positive and I would have given at least a 4/5 star rating. It was the most tedious in the last 20-or-so minutes, when there were 'false endings'. I would see a shot, and think: "This is the perfect place to end the film!" And then I would see another shot, confirming to me that evidently the director thought otherwise. There was at least 3 of these moments, and left me audibly groaning each time it didn't actually end.

It also didn't help that Treadwell is an unlikeable person. He acted as though he was superior to everyone else, calling himself the saviour of bears, and on more than one occasion, he told pretty much the whole of civilisation [...] So naturally, I didn't take a shine. So an unlikeable main character (if that is what we can call him), coupled with the dragging out of the film, didn't really capture my interest.