BLU-RAY
REVIEW: INTO THE WILD
12/14/08
“Into the Wild”, the
critically appraised film directed by Sean Penn and based on
a book by Jon Krakauer, falls a little short by my
standards. Maybe, my expectations were too high, but I was
at the least mildly disappointed. It’s a sad state of
affairs when all it takes to get the critics’ praise is to
slow down the narrative to a crawl and a character that
reads directly from a book and speaks in metaphors. It just
seems too easy.
In “Into the Wild”, Chris McCandless (Emile Hirsch) has just
graduated from Emory University. At a graduation celebration
dinner with his parents, Chris has an argument about his
car. Chris has an old junker of a car and his parent want to
buy him a brand new car. However, Chris doesn’t want it.
Chris doesn’t want material things; he associates these
material things and money with his parent’s detached
relationship. Chris wanting to leave a society that
treasures material things, decides to travel to Alaska to
live in the wild, but before he sets off on his journey, he
donates his life savings, burns the cash in his pocket and
abandons his cars. Chris McCandless even takes up a new
name, that of Alex Supertramp.
On his way to Alaska, Chris meets quite a cast of characters
that live free of careers, money and any sort of financial
responsibility. These are people that are truly free and
Chris finds this simply live sort of attractive. He manages
to support himself by taking odds jobs. One of these odd
jobs ends up being on a farm managed by Wayne Westerberg
(Vince Vaughn), but Chris finds living on the money Wayne
pays way to easy and prefers the adventures he had when he
was penniless.
Once in Alaska, Chris has his adventure, but wines up in
some trouble when he is not able to cross the river out of
the wilderness, because of the melting ice. In the end,
Chris learns a big lesson that he scribes on his notebook
and his parent finally understand how Chris feels specially
his father Walt McCandless(William Hurt).
“In the Wild”, has a superb cast and Emile Hirsch is pitch
perfect. William Hurt who blends into his characters for
just about any movie he does is textbook perfect and even
Vince Vaughn who we are not use to seeing play these type of
character does a great job.
The main problem with the movie is the pacing. The movie
takes a long time to get where it is going and while it is
doing this it doesn’t seem to do much but stall. A whole
thirty minutes could have been cut out from the movie
without losing any of its essence. There are also a lot of
arty shots that don’t seem to fit with the movie and just
come out of the blue. Penn just throws then out thinking, oh
these shots should increase the chance of getting an Oscar
nominations.
Paramount is releasing “Into the Wild” in Blu-ray and it
looks stunning. I was blown way by the way Alaska looked on
my 54” LCD TV. The colors are vivid and the landscape of all
the different locations looks dazzling. The skin tones, the
look of the sky and the river almost make you feel like you
are there and the sound is just as good. The Dolby TrueHD
audio is stunning and Eddie Veddar‘s, lead singer of Pearl
Jam, vocals have never sounded better. Since Eddie Veddar
wrote all of the songs directly for the movie, they all fit
perfectly.
Review By Milton Brayson
milton@smartcine.com
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VIDEO:
1080P Widescreen Version
(2.35:1)
AUDIO:
English 5.1
Dolby TrueHD, English 5.1 Dolby Digital, French 5.1 Dolby
Digital, Spanish 5.1 Dolby Digital
Subtitles: English, English SDH ,French, Spanish, Portuguese
SPECIAL FEATURES:
AInto the Wild: The Story, The Characters. A
behind-the-scenes look at film with: Sean Penn discussing
how he became interested in the book and Jon Krakauer
discussing how he discovered the story. (21:54).
Into the Wild: The experience - Emile Hirsch and the
rest of the cast discuss their experiences with the film.
Emile Hirsch discuses the difficulties of filming in Alaska.
(17:20)
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