Christian Clifton looks at the themes in The Grey and how it brought him face to face with his faith and mortality.
This past week I found myself watching The Grey again. I like this movie, and not just because it has Liam Neeson but because it deals with some things that I find myself contemplating. It might seem like an odd movie compared to some of Neeson’s more recent roles but it’s worth the time to check out.
The films plot involves a group of Alaskan oil workers who find themselves stranded after their plane crashes en route back to town. Not long after the crash the men learn that they are within the territory of a pack of grey wolves and are forced to fight and flee in an effort to survive. Neeson’s character Ottway, having knowledge as a hunter and of how wolf packs work becomes the de facto leader of the group. The men are forced to try and find a way to survive while being faced with death that could come at any moment.
The Grey’s best feature by far is the way it forces the characters, and by extension the audience, to explore some intense themes. Being faced with the deaths of many others and constant threat the main characters have to come to terms with faith, hope, and most of all death.
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I have faith in something bigger than me, that my life has some kind of grand meaning to it. However it is not very often that I think about it in context of a life and death situation. Being an American my faith hasn’t ever really suffered terrible testing of my faith from some outside source, a fact that the movie quickly reminded me of. I like to think that my faith would be worth something in a crisis, that it would give me strength to press on.
It’s not often that we contemplate what it would look like to lose our faith and what that would mean for our lives, I certainly don’t spend much time doing it. It’s a weird place to try and put my mind and it ultimately leaves me without a lot of answers. I know my life would look very different if not for my faith, and so I know that if it failed me in a time of crisis it could be a very ugly outcome indeed.
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As a guy, especially a young guy, I fall victim to believing in some kind of personal invincibility for myself. It may be a little bit of hormones still lingering from puberty but it also might be from an avoidance of thinking about my own mortality.
Sure I know that I will die someday, but somehow my own death does not seem to be real. It seems so far off that being constantly worried about it would be fruitless and so there is some false sense of security that comes from ignorance. To be perfectly honest when I seriously consider my own demise I find myself more than a little afraid.
That is something I don’t know if I have said often enough, admitting that I have fear about something doesn’t seem right but it has to be said. If faced with the same situation that the men in The Grey find themselves in I have no idea how I would handle it. I won’t let my pride and bravado tempt me to claim that I could easily overcome, sure I want to be able to brag about my own ability to survive but pride rarely counts for anything in facing death. I know I am just as likely become frozen with fear as I would find that adrenaline rush to survive.
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One of the better lines from the movie comes from a poem attributed the Ottway’s father, four simple lines that unsurprisingly become a major theme to the movie and the last lines said by him in the movie.
“Once more into the fray, into the last good fight I’ll ever know. Live and die on this day, live and die on this day.”
This was written by the film’s director, Joe Carnahan, as he was creating the back story of Ottway’s father. It pulls together nicely the questions on faith and death, bringing them into a singular thought and ending with a declaration to take on life and accept death at the same time.
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The movie ends with an implied fight between Ottway and the alpha male wolf, one that I am glad was not actually shown on screen. There is an after credits scene that leaves the results of the fight up to viewer interpretation, something that the director supported in an interview. He mentioned that not showing the fight and its outcome would lead to more people being willing to talk about the movie and contemplate themes it presents.
The Grey was good in the sense that it made me look into myself, something that I was not expecting to do when I started the movie. I’m glad that the movie was not afraid to ask some real questions about some very serious subjects, subjects that a lot of people avoid. It came packaged as a movie for guys and so I think it made some of these points a little more accessible to us as a gender. If you don’t mind sitting through something with a little slower pace that has some depth to it, The Grey would be worth your time.
–Photo Credit: Paxson Woelber/flickr