I felt a surprising lack of sympathy for the main character.
Which I liked, because yeah, I’m three, four years late to this film, but I’ve heard nothing but praise for this film since and how people want to just Leave It All Behind like Christopher (Hirsch), so I was expecting some sort of life changing event to bring us, with Christopher, into the wild (ooh, title!)
But there wasn’t. No, it turns out Christopher McCandless (newly christened Alexander Supertramp)...well. He was like, the original hipster hipster’s now want to be (without abandoning the parental support, that is). His main problem was however, was that he possessed little to no skill-set in terms of survival. So that’s problematic.
Buses are the new Lofts...
Because you kinda need to know how to survive in the wild to...survive in the wild. Which wasn’t too great for Christopher/Alex.
Anyway. I suppose, aside from the great directing from Sean Penn, I was pretty apathetic about this film. It just...was nothing that spoke to me. Maybe if I had watched it back in 2007, I might have gotten that whole message of ‘live free’ and all that mumbo jumbo, but I didn’t get that here in 2011. Wrong age? Wrong time? Wrong everything? It’s weird how this film was ultimately pretencious, but didn’t manage to be actually pretencious.
Yeah, that made no sense. Whatever.
Traveling by car? Too mainstream.
The acting was great, the direction was great, but the story itself just bugged me. He ‘discovered’ himself. What is up with people wanting to do that so much? How do we not know who we are already? I feel like we, as a North American myself, we have somehow decided that even though most of us came over by ship, we’re all actually Natives of this land, and that we all have spirit animals and guides and all the rest of that ignorant horse shit. I guess whatever floats your boat is fine, but don’t try and pin it on the peoples who you killed and took land from.
I guess I just felt really sorry for Christopher/Alex’s parents and younger sister. Yeah, his parents might not have been the greatest in the world, but they certainly cared for him and his well-being. And even though I’m no where near being a parent myself, my heart broke a little when he wrote postcards to them that never got sent. It’s just so sad that even though they’d never have understood, that he couldn’t tell them what he was doing, and where he was going, and why. I don’t know, I feel like had he given them the chance, they might have eventually understood. Or pending that, they’d have at least known where he went. So it just seemed really, really selfish.
Oh, and this is in no way a spoiler, because apparently the story of Christopher/Alex was pretty big at one point (I have no idea, I’m relying on information from a friend within the mountaineering community), but he’s dead now. And the entire way through this film, all I could end up thinking was how if he had planned this out a little more, did his research into the flora and fauna, and how the seasons work (major plot point) up there in Alaska, he probably could have come out of it alive.
Ah well.
I like how the first "positive comment" is how little you like the main character. You're thinking how the rest of the review goes from there ;)
ReplyDeleteIf you read the book, you would know that Christopher called himself Alexander Supertramp and that he actually had a very good knowledge of how to survive. He was simply unlucky in the end.
ReplyDelete