The Grey (2011)

I'm caught again by the end of the week without many options for the blog, so I must deal with it by writing about something that's not actually very good. However, since the IMDb rating for "The Grey" seems decent (actually above what I would give) I said that maybe it fits as an option for today ...

The movie is somewhere in the survival adventure/thriller genre on a close subject line with "Jaws", "Anaconda", etc. This, if you read the synopsis. After you see it from start to finish though, it's hard to put it near the mentioned. The reasons are many and diverse ... But, let's start with the story: we have a plane transporting several workers from an oil platform in Alaska to the inner part of the continent in the middle of the winter. The plane crashes and the the result is seven survivors struggling to find somebody in order not to get frozen to death. The problem of the cold though, gets quickly secondary, after the men find themselves aggressively harassed by a wolf pack. As usual, I won't get further than the context, but anyway ... there is not much left to be told.

I didn't check but I assume that "The Grey" is rated R. Besides the fact that the movie is quite hard to watch, I guess that "restricted" fits here also more particularly to other situations in which watching the movie won't probably be a very pleasant experience: from being an animal lover (especially of dogs) up to having a flight scheduled nearly + others. Anyway, leaving this aside, I could say that the hard part of the movie is also the good part. And the one making the difference as least commercially than others - "Anaconda" again as a negative example here. And this happens due to the cinematography and especially editing that contributes to the atmosphere a lot. Unlike other titles, the movie does not follow the idea of making a score at the box-office from the abundance of bloody scenes (although the present ones get quite rough). After all this is probably the reason why it cannot be regarded as a horror (although it's not very far). But if the cinematography and editing are the good parts .. and I think I started in other direction, maybe it would be the case to come back to the original idea ...

Maybe it's me, but lately it seems I very often have the same problem .. again I think we have something that takes itself too seriously ... Leaving apart the fact that the wolf pack behavior seems a bit unrealistic, although I'm not an expert in wildlife, my major problem is with the script. After the first ten minutes you already know that what you have in front is not the usual "Piranha 3D" stuff. But after this the situation slowly changes .. You get more & more melodramatic background stories of the characters, classic crisis speeches, the usual "one by one .. who dies next" horror theme. To conclude, it slowly gets too Hollywoodish, and the bad part is that it tries to hide that .. = in the end I was left with the editing as the "something else" factor. Even the soundtrack that was nice, and a bit known, I confirmed myself after that is partially reused from "Ink". Therefore ...

Rating: 3 out of 5