"The Grey" Starring Liam Neeson: I Hated It... Then I Kinda Liked It!

SPOILER ALERT: This post gives away the ending!  Don't read it if you haven't seen The Grey!  (Not that anybody is reading my blog anyway, ha ha!)

My twin brother and his wife would think I was crazy for picking this movie as a favorite, especially after our initial reaction and the fact that we saw a bunch of other perfectly fine movies this month.  And perhaps they’d be right to make such an observation.  None of us liked it when we first saw it.  It was grueling to sit through, and initially reminded me of Eight Below, the one in which a group of dogs stranded in the wilderness begin to die one at a time.  This whole movie The Grey is really nothing more than one death after another, as a group of plane crash survivors perish in several ways trying to stay one step ahead of a pack of vicious wolves.  Some die from the wolf attacks, and others from sickness, exposure to the elements, drowning, or falling great distances.  We even made jokes at the end, similar to some critics who didn’t like it, about how the movie is nothing but depressing and full of death, and for a survival tale, it’s interesting to note that no one survives.  I couldn’t really understand what my sister and older brother saw in it when they mentioned on Facebook how much they liked it, and the positive spiritual messages it had.  For me, it was similar to Stephen King’s The Mist, which I had picked to watch, and which had an extreme downer of an ending, causing my sister-in-law Darece to stand up and shout “Gary!” and I could only look back sheepishly and apologize, and my sister later reprimanded me for not warning her about it before she and her husband watched it.  But this movie was obviously different.  We had had a negative reaction, but there was all those positive reviews on Flixster, and my sister and brother supporting it on Facebook.  It made me wonder what I was missing.

     Then a strange thing happened.  The next day at church, the message was about the courage of St. Paul during impossible situations from the book of Acts, and while the pastor gave his powerful, eloquent sermon, I couldn’t get The Grey out of my mind.  It’s almost like God was nudging me, saying “Look at it from this perspective.  Examine it with Christian eyes.”  I realized it wasn’t a survival tale, as it had been promoted.  It was actually a tale about facing our fears, and death, and in that sense, it has a lot in common with the third Alien film.  It’s basically a film not about surviving, but facing death when survival is no longer a possibility.  What do you do when you realize you are NOT going to survive?  In this case, everything around these men – the plane, the snow, the wilderness, their own health, and particularly the wolves – represent death.  

     Death is the final challenge, the final fear we must face.  Jesus spoke to His followers many times in the Bible concerning the fears they faced, including death, and he told them “Do not be afraid.”  In the film, Liam Neeson keeps seeing visions of his wife before she died of cancer, lying under sheets in a sunny room, and telling him “Don’t be afraid,” and “It’s okay.”  These visions would always end with him being ripped back into the reality of his horrible situation.  The men talk religion and philosophy around the campfires they build to ward off the wolves and the cold, to stay warm, and to stay alive.  In the beginning, right after the plane crash, one seriously injured man isn’t going to survive for very long at all, and Neeson calms him down, asking him if there is someone he loves who can help him cross over, and telling him to just accept it, and it will come upon him, and it will be warm, and that it’s going to be okay.  And it works.  The guy dies rather peacefully.  For the rest of the movie, each one of the survivors meets death.  Some go kicking and screaming.  Others seem to just accept it, like the injured passenger.  After injuring his leg, the guy who was belittling the others simply can’t keep up anymore, and they leave him by the river in the middle of a majestic view, and he accepts what is going to happen to him.  The wolves will be there soon, but there is a peacefulness about him now.  In the end, when it is only Neeson left, he screams to the sky, telling God off, and demanding God for any kind of a sign that He exists.  Then he wanders right into the middle of the wolf den, and though this could be considered God’s answer, that’s not quite how the movie ends.  At the beginning of the film, he’s suicidal, and almost bites a bullet after the death of his wife.  Now, even though he finds himself surrounded by vicious, ravenous wolves, he tapes a bunch of broken bottles to one hand, and holds a knife in the other.  He wants to fight to live.  And then there’s a mysterious five second scene after the credits that shows the alpha wolf laying down on the ground and breathing heavily, like it’s been mortally wounded, and you can see the top of Neeson’s head on the other side of it, as if he’s using it as a pillow, as if he is “laying down with death.”

     I didn’t much care for Alien 3 when I first saw it, because they killed off almost the entire cast of Aliens, and it made that movie and that struggle now seem pointless.  The only survivors were the android Bishop, in such disrepair that he doesn’t want to continue existing, and Ripley, who soon comes to realize she has one of those alien things in her chest and she’s not long for this world.  But that didn’t mean that Alien 3 wasn’t dealing with some interesting themes about death, and facing death, and accepting death.  It’s just not the sort of movie you want to see when you’re expecting a fun, scary, sci fi survival story like Aliens.  The Grey is very similar.  Its promotional campaign made it seem more like Aliens, when in fact, it is much closer to Alien 3.  That means that it may be intelligent, and may deal with interesting themes, but it doesn’t make for such an entertaining time at the movies.  It’s a movie you might not like while you watch it, but that doesn’t mean it might not cause you to think about it later.  As such, this is a film that is also similar to Moulin Rouge and The Matrix, or even Napoleon Dynamite, in that it’s worth a second look.  It’s more enjoyable to think about afterwards, and it becomes one of those movies I might actually want to see again, but with a different mindset.