The Grey (2011)

Director: Joe Carnahan                                  Writers: Joe Carnahan & Ian Mackenzie Jeffers
Film Score: Marc Streitenfeld                         Cinematography: Masanobu Takayanagi
Starring: Liam Neeson, Frank Grillo, Dermot Mulroney and Dallas Roberts

While for some the underlying thematic elements of this movie might seem corny, they ultimately feel ingenious, and it’s one of the better things about it. The Grey is an intense survival film about a group of men lost in the Arctic wilderness. But at the same time that they are fighting off attacks from a pack of wolves, the men themselves are also defining their roles within their own “pack” and must determine who is the natural alpha male of the group. And just like when younger wolves challenge the current alpha in the pack, some of the men want to take the leadership role away from Neeson, but it’s always to their detriment. The other thematic element is an existential nihilism professed by Frank Grillo and agreed with by Neeson. It would be nice to believe in some kind of divine presence in a situation like that, but the reality is it’s exactly the fairy tale that Grillo says it is. The screenplay was written by Ian Mackenzie Jeffers from his story “Ghost Walker,” and assisted by director Joe Carnahan. The director had helmed some fairly pedestrian action films prior to this, but with Jeffers onboard he came up with a terrific story and produced a very good film.

The film begins in the north of Alaska, on an oil company job site maintaining a pipeline. Liam Neeson plays a hired killer . . . of wolves. It’s is job to go out with the teams during the winter, when food is scarce, and protect them from wolf attacks. As the film opens he walks into a rough and rowdy bar at the site, but seems to notice nothing, deep in the world of his own thoughts of his beautiful wife, who has apparently left him. The voice-over is a letter to her. He takes a drink, leaves, and when he gets to a remote place on the site, prepares to shoot himself. But he stops when he hears a wolf howl in the distance. The next day he boards a plane with a group of other men heading for Anchorage. Joe Anderson plops down next to him, his mouth running constantly, and when Neeson tells him he doesn’t want to talk he’s made his first enemy. An hour later, while most of the passengers are asleep, the plane goes down. Neeson, who was thrown out before the crash, awakes from the trauma and walks back to the wreckage to find out who else is left alive. Seven others are, initially, but James Badge Dale dies right away from his wounds. From then on it’s the wolves who pose the biggest threat as they begin to pick off the weakest men one by one.

Frank Grillo is the first to challenge Neeson’s authority, but Neeson simply shrugs and says he’s heading for the trees and if anyone wants to come along they can. Grillo bristles, but stays with the group. That night in the trees, however, he threatens Neeson and gets taken down by the true leader. Others in the group include Dermot Mulroney and Dallas Roberts who struggle to stay one step ahead of the wolves. The setting is bleak, hundreds of miles from any kind of civilization, and one of the vital aspects of the film’s success is the sound effects and sound editing. The sound of the wind as it whistles across landscape, kicking up snow like dust and whiting out everything, is omnipresent. And when the men finally make it to the trees, it’s the sound of the wolves howling in the dark, moving around, and growling that are the real fear producing elements. Visual effects are also important, as there are very few actual wolves in the film in order to avoid difficulties with treatment to the animals. The wolves in long shot are obviously real, but the ones in close up are incredibly good replicas by the effects department and used sparingly. In that context the sound effects are even more important.

Joe Carnahan has a very strong vision and his close work with Jeffers makes for a very good film. It also doesn’t hurt to have Ridley Scott as the producer. The brief scenes with Neeson and his wife, Anne Openshaw, when he is ripped out of his dreams by the plane crash, are really great in the way that they jolt him back to reality. Unlike the Taken films or others of their kind, Liam Neeson displays a real vulnerability here that is refreshing. The rest of the actors are relatively unknown, however, and even those who aren’t are buried under a weeks’ worth of whiskers which sort of masks their identity, and that adds to the realism of the film as well. There’s some debate among fans about the ending, but there’s really nothing controversial about it. The obvious ending is the ending, something confirmed by Carnahan in the audio commentary, and the final shot after the credits are finish doesn’t change that, but only serves to reinforce it. The Grey is a solid character study of men in the wilderness fighting not only against the elements but against predators with overwhelming odds, and has a symbolic subtext that lifts it above the average thriller by a wide margin.