Alaska. After a two-week shift in the field, the workers of a refinery are about to leave for their homes to hug their families. Among them is John Ottway, a middle-aged man who monitors the outer area where the workers operate to ensure that wolves and other wild animals do not approach. While they are returning home, a storm causes a malfunction of the airplane and the aircraft crashes in the tundra of Alaska. Only eight survive the accident, but now a very hard trial awaits them: surviving the weather and, above all, a pack of hungry wolves that immediately attack them.
It is not easy to make a film like "The Grey". Whether it is due to the "limit" climatic conditions that the crew and cast are forced to face, the difficulty of making the wolves credibly threatening, or the challenge of not making the audience miss the survival films that made past adventure cinema great. Director and screenwriter Joe Carnahan fully succeeds in this endeavor and with "The Grey" delivers to the viewer a compact and hard film, solid and gripping, catapulting us directly to the best examples of 1970s survival movies.
The origin of "The Grey" is in a story by writer Ian Mackenzie Jeffers, "Ghost Walkers", and Carnahan's film has a bit of the breath of a coming-of-age story, in which everything is seen from the point of view of a single character and filtered through his obsessions, his fears, and above all his weaknesses. Indeed, when we meet John Ottway, he is tormented by a candida female figure: he dreams of her, suffers for her, and is on the verge of suicide because of her. Until the end, we will not know who that woman is — but we can easily guess it — however, we have enough elements to understand that John has nothing to lose from the serious situation in which he is involved, and it is from this premise that it is very interesting to note the transformation of the man's spirit, from aspiring suicide to warrior who intends to sell his skin dearly. "The Grey" is, for this reason, a reflection on the strength of human will, on the instinct of self-preservation, which pushes any individual to character transformation, bringing out the beast that is in each of us. To face the grey of the title, that is, the huge alpha male of the pack of wolves, one must become a predator ready for anything.
Very good work done by Carnahan on the screenplay, which takes all the time to develop the characters to the best, each different from the other and with specific peculiarities as if the eight survivors were parts of a single individual: the aggressive, the wise, the weak, the expert, etc., each of them contributes to keeping the situation alive and making the group survive in the critical condition in which they are. Interesting, in this regard, to note how the more the body count increases, the more complicated it becomes for the group to navigate through the difficulties of the climate and the place and the attacks of the wolves. And the wolves, precisely, are one of the attractions of "The Grey". Carnahan's film is not a beast movie, at least not entirely, because the gigantic grey wolves are only one of the difficulties in front of which the protagonists are placed, but the concept of eco vengeance is well readable between the lines because it seems almost that the refinery workers are put to the test by Nature that they probably contribute to annihilating. John, in particular, kills wolves for work making sure that his colleagues carry out the process of deconstruction of the natural environment. The wolves are like guardians/warriors and their attack on the defenseless workers can be read as a sort of punishment. For John, the wolves are like demons that come to collect their toll, that put his fears bare. Not surprisingly, in one of the first face-to-face contacts, the wolves appear as supernatural beings, silent and invisible, with only the unsettling eyes that light up in the dark.
Joe Carnahan has been known in the past mainly for action films such as "Smokin' Aces" and "A-Team", "The Grey" is, however, a completely different work, more serious and with different rhythms, the best of Carnahan's films so far. Perhaps only the ending could leave someone dissatisfied, but do not get up before the end of the credits because there is an additional rather important scene waiting for us.
Practically perfect Liam Neeson as the protagonist, an artistically reborn actor at almost sixty years old.
Add half a pumpkin to the final vote.
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