Into the Wild a Review

 

I saw the movie, “Into the Wild” the night before last. If you aren’t familiar with the story, in brief it is about Christopher McCandless, a young man who decided to go on walkabout for a couple years after graduating college. The interest in his story was sparked when an article was written by Jon Krakauer, the original article can be found here Gosh I hope the link works.Anyway, Krakauer is known for writing, “Under the Banner of Heaven” and “Into Thin Air” both well reviewed and real life accounts of terrible tragedies. I suppose when great interest was shown regarding the article Krakauer decided to turn this story into a book as well. Sean Penn read the book, took a great personal interest in the tale and decided he wanted to make it into a film. The film is what I will be reviewing, but I may buy the book which at this time has over a thousand reviews on Amazon.The first scene was deeply disturbing to me as a parent because I can imagine what it would feel like if my child disappeared off the face of the Earth for any extended period of time and perhaps being a parent slants my view of the movie. While as parents we must always face the inevitability that our children will want to venture out on their own I would hope they would at some point have the human decency to drop of a postcard, that stated, at the very least, I have decided to live of the grid for awhile and I am alive, will keep in touch with you even though I don’t want to because it’s the right thing to do.Now most people who review the film feel that it is heroic and admirable to live out our dreams and to have high minded ideals which we live out. I too felt this way about McCandless. Indeed I often envied his ability to live off the land and boldly go where many of us fear to tread.But at the same time I felt that seeing the movie also incited a fear in me, a fear that could become a detriment to those who would choose freedom because of the outcome. It proved to me that going off the grid requires more than an act of self-indulgent ineptitude or maybe it just requires a well thought out plan. Either way I feel that actions taken based upon emotional impulses usually end tragically. This movie revealed a hidden agenda, a rage based motive that I think few care to look at and it is my understanding of these impulses that brings me to the page. I noticed that while McCandless placed great emphasis on becoming physically fit he devoted no time to actually learning what it would take to live in the Alaskan wilderness. Surely a couple of hours talking to a self-proclaimed outdoors man does not and Alaskan Adventurer make.It seems McCandless youth and idealism lead him to believe that the Universe would support him in even the harshest of terrains as it had so well during the rest of his adventure where he was able to meet and be fed by kind strangers who did their best to teach him about what is real and true in this world. Indeed, he disregarded and threw away most all that he had been given or offered, including the most valuable asset, love. Why, because he was going to prove he could go it alone, but he never noticed that he was never really going it alone even if he felt like he was.This I found was a tragic road to enlightenment, one we all can benefit from, and in the end he scribbled in between sentences in a book the truth. We do need others. We do need to forgive in order to be truly free. We do need to move past our hurts, because wherever you go, even if it is the Alaskan Tundra, there you are. His was a high ideal laid barren, wide open and vile for the whole world to see. I am happy to have gotten a glimpse of it and I applaud him for his efforts and if only he had listened as we all must do to his teachers along the way he might be the one writing his own story. He might be the one telling his terrific tale and while I applaud I boo at the same time because it would have been so easy for him to come out on the other side.I found this factual account about him on Wikpedia Which describes how easy it would have been for him to actually survive given his circumstances and location. I learned a lot researching his story, and perhaps this was the legacy he was meant to leave and for that I Thank him.

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