THE GREY Post-Relese Discussion - Page 2

Man, knowing how Neeson's wife died, I wonder how much of that influenced his performance.

Nothing much to add yet, still digesting, but I loved it.  Neeson just owns every frame of this.  Carnahan really surprised me too; I liked the guy a lot before and he's always had a keen eye for action/adventure, but I was not expecting this kind of emotional resonance.  

 

I will say that my audience HATED the ending.  But fuck them.

Everyone's audience hates the ending, which just did not have to be the case. I like it intellectually, but emotionally, it's all wrong.

Threads merged!

Does the script maintain the wife being dead so it points to that ending being a hallucination?  Or is she alive?

That's so weirdly tonally off from the rest of the movie.

 

I'd still have liked to have seen the Ottway vs. Alpha fight, but still have some ambiguity and not an on the nose happy ending.

Fantastic fucking movie. But yeah...didn't care for the ending.

So fucking good.

Yeah and that's why it pisses me off when my friends say they hated this movie. I mean, really they just hate the end of the movie not the movie itself. But it annoys me as they go around bad wording the movie and putting others off from seeing it.

 

That would have been fifty times worse than what ended up happening.

I thought it started out promising, but eventually became downright unbelievable and silly (not in a good way) in its last act (the tree-jumping business is so ridiculous). The scene with Diaz is so poorly staged, shot and worded and drags on interminably. There's a nice idea at its core, but developing it goes on way too long and then beats us over the head. I get that the movies themes are the futile struggle of man versus nature and the fact that death is unavoidable, but that doesn't stop the last half hour from being a dulls-ville death march, with occasional bits of unintentional hilarity (Neeson, shouting at the drowning guy, "What the fuck are you doing down there?") And I know a lot of you found his "god speech" to be effective, but as hard as he's trying in that scene, the dialogue lets him down big time. It's a cliched "STLLLA!" speech of the highest order. 

Neeson is good and I can understand why this was a personal project for him, but at its core, the Grey feels it's attempting for some great existential nihilism it can't begin to actually know how to work with, and it's "ambiguous" ending underlines its confusion perfectly. I didn't see the credit cookie, so I assumed Neeson was just dead but going down fighting, which is a nicer finish than suggesting otherwise if you ask me (Carnahan wants his cake and eats it too, eh?). But despite that pretty damn great ending, the movie doesn't earn it. Not to me, at least.

I had the exact opposite reaction.  Great first 20 minutes, uninteresting middle, then it got really good around the second night time bonfire where the wolves were too lazy/drunk to pester them.

 

I remember when the first trailer came out and it had that introduction with Neeson and Frank Grillo and I thought "wtf is the racist/homophobe cop from The Shield doing there."  Guy was legit, and I thought the scene where he gives up was the best in the movie.

Strong, muscular filmmaking, but I wouldn't recommend it to anybody who's depressed.

I fucking loved this, ending and all.   I do think the marketing fucked up by including the final shot in the trailer, though.  

 

The attack on Diaz right in the middle of his campfire apology is one of the best jump-scares I've experienced in a loooong time.  

On the one hand, I don't know how you would market this movie in an attempt to make money. On on the other hand, this movie shouldn't feel the need to be a box office juggernaut (though I hear it did come in #1 for the weekend, huzzah). On an another hand (the guy in my analogy has three apparently), they dropped the ball on the trailers, painting it to be something it's not, with whispers of that lady who demanded money back because Drive wasn't a Fast and Furious film. Or, maybe it's genius, because after all, the film is #1 at the box office and at the end of the day, you pay for the movie up front so bad ending or good, the money has still been exchanged. I expect a major dropoff.

 

On the movie itself, Neeson is my favorite "action" hero. It comes with being a respected actor in his own right. He's physical and a great presence, but nobody else could have sold that God scene and made it heartbreaking like Neeson does. I almost like where they end it, and I suppose thematically it makes some sense (it's not the outcome, it's the fight, the will to engage that defines), but I'll toss my hat into the cocktease pile.

 

Course, I woulda ended it with Neeson ascending the top of the den and throwing the Alpha's body off and declaring himself King Shit of Wolf Mountain, but I guess that's why I'm here.

Edited by Doc Happenin - 1/29/12 at 4:31pm

What a fantastic film.  And the ending is thematically perfect.  We've just watched Ottway give up.  He's stacking the wallets, he's grieving for the lost men, he's tossing away his letter.  He, like Diaz, is done.  Then he realizes where he is and sees the alpha, and he makes the decision to go down fighting.  We don't need to see the fight to find out who won.  He won the second he decided to get up and fight.

 

I mean, they quote the poem right before this happens.  "One last good fight."  Which is exactly what Ottway does.  Everything after that is superfluous.  Yeah, we didn't get to see Liam Neeson fight a wolf.  Get over it.

 

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It's also an echo of the last time we see Diaz, resting against the log.

 

My reading was exactly the same. Ottway got a brief shot in the arm of vitality in the immediate aftermath of the crash, because there was finally someone in the world who needed him. With the loss of the last of his fellow survivors in the river, that's gone. We don't know how much time passes between the river and the wolfs' den, how many hours he's spent alone with his thoughts, but by the time the alpha shows up he's done. He's building a cairn out of the wallets and saying his last goodbyes to photos of strangers. He wasn't equipped to go it alone before the crash, and he isn't able to at the end, either.

I'm reminded of Devin's review of The Wolf Man, and how he turned it into an examination of his personal issues with anger management; it struck me then and still seems to me now to have been one of the gutsiest pieces of writing I've seen from him, due to his willingness to take his own armor off. In the interest of disclosure, the December of 2004 saw me in the grip of a suicidal depression when the news reached me that the National Guard unit I was assigned with was going to deploy to Afghanistan in a few months. I realize that my positive reception of this movie is in no small part due to projection.

I've been that guy. I've received that shot in the arm and been handed a sense of purpose that kept me going until I could find my own way. To see what Neeson's character goes through, several years removed now from my own experience, is to reflect on that experience with the safety of having it miles behind me and say goodbye to it.

Carnahan really came into his own throughout this film.

 

I love his style of repeating a scene throughout a movie and then showing the truth at the end. (Mike's death in Narc,  The real reason for the contract on Buddy Aces Isreal in Smoking Aces,  The wife in The Grey)

I actually think it's a fairly inspiring film in that way. When Hendrick confronts Ottway about the night he left the bar, Ottway replies that it didn't really matter now, indicating that he'd more or less moved past that moment b/c he'd found a reason to. I also love that the reason (as I see it) that he spoke about his father as opposed to his wife when they were around the campfire, had less to do with his not being ready to talk about that and more to do with giving these men something to hold onto in a dire situation. I love that his father never took credit for the poem. Says a lot about him, and by extension, his son. You get the feeling that if his father was in the same position, he'd be the last man standing with a broken liquor bottle in hand and the words "wolf repellent" etched into the side.

 

 

Damn, good catch! You guys are right, the stronger implication is that he's dying along with the wolf.

I really dug it.  I laughed at loud at the ending.  Would I have loved a fight scene between Liam and the wolf?  Shit yeah.  But I also love how it ended.  I can appreciated someone not liking the ending or hell, not liking the movie.  But when the frat douchebags leaving behind me were complaining that it was the worst movie they had ever seen, "And I watched Jumper on TV last night." "Hey, Jumper was pretty good.  Way better than this shit," well, goddamn.  

 

Weirdly enough, the movie made me think of a combination of The Edge and The Descent.  

Looks like the flick opened to $20M, so it looks like everyone goes home happy enough.

The highlight to me was the stunning sound design (especially during the plane crash) and Neeson talking that guy through his death, everything else was only intermittently engrossing.  I would be into it, then "off" stuff would bother me and take me out of the film until something visceral and exciting would pull me back in.  By off I mean McDermott's weird speech about his daughter's hair, Henrich's captain obvious expository dialog concerning dude's hallucinations and that ridonkulous nonsense crossing to the trees.  They would have each needed to be carrying an extra backpack of linen to create that rope, but I digress.  I thought Neeson was great to be sure and his costars acquitted themselves admirably.  I just didn't find the subtext that interesting.  Although silly and overblown, The Edge tread this Robert Bly emotional workshop ground before and better, I felt. 

 

I did love the look of the film a great deal though.  There were some truly gorgeous shots of the men walking single file through a whiteout blizzard and through the forest with snow gently falling about them that conveyed the theme as fully as any speeches about alpha this and that or any wallet collecting/piling. 

 

I intellectually understand that the ending works, but every single piece of marketing (yes, I also understand the film maker isn't responsible for that and how at cross purposes it is with his intent) sold me on a bill of goods that stated I would get the other end of Neeson electrical taping those mini bottles on his wrist Wolverine style and charging "into the fray".  I don't care how thematically compelling the ending supposedly is as it stands, I didn't plunk down 30$ for me and my wife to not see that fight.  

I saw this without so much as having seen a trailer and loved it.  The ending made perfect sense at the time -- I expected it to black out when it did, because the movie had said everything it needed to by that point.  (Watching the trailer afterward, yeah, I can see why people were upset.)

 

My reading of the post-credits bit was certainly that they had killed each other.

The definitely killed each other, they mirrored each other throughout the film, both putting down an omega within minutes of one another. They were both alphas in their respective packs.

 

I thought it was a fantastic movie despite some flaws. I had trouble with the cliff/trees scene... I'm usually thrilled to give up realism and come along for the thematic ride, but there's a limit and I feel like it was broken watching that scene. The execution just wasn't there.

 

But everything else was great. I loved the sound design and visuals of the film, Neeson was very good as Ottway and I thought Grillo crushed it as Diaz.

 

I'm still thinking about family, survival, and death hours after driving home. Well done by Joe, great movie.

I loved this. I have had a brutal year and this spoke to me on a deep personal level. One of the best ruminations on atheism and what it means to keep living when you have no reason to I have ever seen. 

Yeah, I thought that was made very clear when Ottway talked about that to the other men, then almost immediately after smacked down Diaz.

 

Interesting tidbit-

 

Remember Talget's hat? There's a big 'WY' on it. Russ Fischer thinks it might be a nod to Alien (as we all know, WY=Weyland-Yutani).

 

He asked Carnahan on Twitter and he responded with this:

 

 

 

https://twitter.com/#!/carnojoe/status/163777984195608576

 

Yeah, I was definitely thinking that myself.  Also, that it was weird seeing Dermot Mulroney in a movie again.  He'll always be Dirty Steve to me.

I know it's never hinted at in the movie, but would they have been better off barricading themselves in the plane and waiting for rescue?

 

Did Ottway make all the wrong decisions, even if he said that he didn't know where the wolf den was?

Barricading themselves in the plane would have been just another version of what they were all doing at the camp -- sitting around waiting to die at the whim of someone else.  Sure, they could have controlled the situation at the crash site somewhat, but their lives would still have been at the mercy of rescuers they had no way of knowing were even coming.  Ottway may have ended up choosing the wrong direction, but he certainly didn't make the wrong choice.

Well, when it's brought up, Ottway says no one is going to come looking. Or, if they did, they'd only send a few helicopters, right? And they'd all freeze to death before anyone found them.

 

However, they actually would have been better off considering what happened (wolves ate their faces) - you're right.

Then again, these were freakin' SUPERWOLVES.

 

It's hard for me to take this movie's ruminations on faith and existence and God when the characters are being chased by some medieval monster-type shit. You CAN make that movie, but you'd need to join the two of them together tonally. I think Carnahan wanted to have his "spiritual exploration" shit, but he also wanted to make a monster movie, and he had no idea how to connect the two.

For what it's worth, I fucking loved this film. Narratively, it's pretty basic, and the premise is hardly original but I thought the dialogue, acting and direction really turned it into something special. It's no particular insight after looking through the internet response to note the synchronicity for Neeson playing this role, and the layers he managed to bring to what could easily have been a one note gruff performance brought a lump or two to my throat. Thought the supporting cast was great and the blend of survival thriller, horror and art house meditation worked really well. There was something really authentic about it. I don't mean in how good the CGI was or the scenery, but I sensed a strong match between actor, theme and director that made it more than the sum of its parts.

 

It shares a strong kinship with "The Road", which I've only read not seen. Both pieces really focus in on masculinity in the face of death without reducing the characters to simple archetypes or libertarian myth figures. There's something about this film that really got to my core and sparked an emotional reaction that dredged up and prompted me to think again about a lot of existential fear, relationship and loss stuff I've been dealing with over the last few years.

 

A really good film that was better by far than two hours of Neeson punching wolves could ever have been.

I've noticed a few people talking about how they were disappointed having been amped up for a fight between Neeson and the wolf before the cut to black. I'm no movie critic, but it seems to me the film put you in precisely the emotional place Neeson's character was in and then quite deliberately raised the question, "How does this end?". That seemed to me to be the point. We don't know how the fight, each and every day, is going to end. "To live or die on this day". Who knows? What's important is being up for it.

 

Up to that point Ottway survived because he used reason and experience. Now, faced by the direct confrontation with his doom, there is no reasoning out of the situation. He can only fight, and live or die. Works for me, but then I guess some would call me a sap.

 

I've seen the point made elsewhere. Apologies, I should have been clearer. You're right, there's a clear risk of "bait and switch" going on in the trailer, and I can't pretend I didn't first think of going to see it as a Neeson punching wolves film. It makes me glad there are critics like Ebert and sites like Chud to set a man straight before he ventures out.

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They also misled by misquoting the poem in the tagline.  Of course, arguably using the exact line could be considered a spoiler.

 

I think we're seeing the wolves filtered through the perceptions of the men being chased by them.  In that situation, normal wolf behavior would look a hell of a lot like some kind of supernatural demon stalking you.

 

Has anybody seen any "They're dead all along" interpretations?

Seconded. And even without that, I read it as Neeson dying. I assumed (perhaps wrongly) that we would have seen Neeson's hand on the wolf had it been intended as a 1-2-1 echo of the earlier scene of the wolf dying. The fact we saw his head read "off" to me and I took from it that things had not worked out well in a material sense.

You know, considering how Lost ended...

There's an interesting population here of people who disliked the ending because of the trailer, and people who disliked the ending because it was dramatically dishonest. I side with the latter.

I have - but can't remember where. No real basis, just a thesis that they are all dead and it's the lost souls amongst them that take their time getting to the afterlife. Seeing as everyone on the plane and at the oil refinery was described as a lost soul (slash "Asshole"), I'm not sure that's enough to stack the interpretation on.

 

 

The tagline I've seen is "LIve or die on this day". Genuinely curious - why does the dropped "To" change the meaning so much?