The Grey (2011)

It is an American survival thriller film based on a novel called Ghost Walker by Ian MacKenzie Jeffers. So…you see wolves and snow but it’s based on by a ‘ghost’ novel…okay? The acting was brilliant especially from the talented Mr. Neeson but the characters seemed to be so mentally ill after the crash landing and they barely wanted to be nice to each other, it’s like they wanted help each other keep strong at where they are but deep down they were selfish and looking out for themselves. The leading character Ottway isn’t right in the head, he has mental health issues and with those issues interfering with him outside in the very cold weather it was hard to tell if his plan helping himself and other survivors stay alive was going to succeed or not. He shows he can have a laugh, so he’s not always miserable and he even made me chuckle a little bit with his dialogue at the beginning, it was good of him explaining what the world and humanity is. It feels like he says it to try and get something off your chest rather than containing it for the content later on in the film and he tells how it is including what the wolves are like. There was the rare odd camera angles but I followed on what was going on from those angles anyway so it wasn’t a huge problem. The setting and sound made me see what the area should have without no special effects or extra enemies to overdo it, I was on the fact that the characters need to stay safe so much I forgot what effects and other enemies they could have had for a snowy place and luckily they didn’t put them in, they didn’t need to. Only wolves were good for this movie, if a polar bear was added into it, that would ruin it, only one type of enemy was enough. The gore wasn’t that much gory, sure there was blood but nothing made me think it was too much. In the middle of watching the film, I forgot the film had a story, it was more of ‘This is what you do when living out in freezing conditions and to remind you, wolves can live in those sort of places'. This film can outsmart a viewer of how they can expect something is going to happen but what THEY expect doesn’t happen and also what they don’t expect does happen, it tries to not be a fool and it let me be the fool because mostly throughout the film I was expecting this and that was just around the corner but I overlooked it multiple times. My perspective on the wolves’ behaviour was one of them, when I saw a wolf appear, I was ready for it to attack like a wolf would do in my view of real life wolves but it did something different. The ending…I don’t mean to be harsh but the ending was terrible, on the way the scene where it ended was going, credits just came right out of the blue, it’s like the film knew I was expecting certain scenery again and it pulled out a trolling trick on me and it said ‘Didn’t expect that did you?’ After the credits there was more too it but it’s only for a few seconds but it’s only an outcome of what happened and you’ve got to decide for yourself what the outcome was and I just prefer ‘an ending’ to the film, I want something to see, not play guessing games.