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Into The Wild (2007) DVD Review
Into The Wild (2007) DVD Credits:
Into The Wild (2007) Directed by:
Sean Penn
Into The Wild (2007) Written by:
Sean Penn
Into The Wild (2007) Cast:
Emile Hirsch, William Hurt, Marcia Gay Harden, Vince Vaughn, Catherine Keener
Into The Wild (2007) Released by:
Not available at this time
Region:
1
Into The Wild (2007) DVD Release Date:
4th March 2008
Our Rating: Extras Rating:

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Into The Wild (2007) Synopsis:

Based on Penn's adaptation of Jon Krakauer's bestseller the film centers on Christopher McCandless (Hirsch), who graduated from college in 1992, abandoned his possessions and hitchhiked to Alaska to live in the wilderness and return to nature. He died four months later in an abandoned bus at a remote campsite.

Into The Wild (2007) DVD Review:

Jon Krakauer’s national best-seller from 1996, Into the Wild, begins with an author’s note in which Krakauer essentially sums up the entire story in the first sentence, even giving away what happens at the very end. This wouldn’t matter much to anyone who had already read what had happened to Christopher Johnson McCandless, the young man from an affluent family who gave up all of his money and possessions to set out on an adventure across the United States, but Sean Penn’s film comes over ten years after the book and has no author’s note preceding it. There have been many stories based on very recent tragedies put on screen recently (A Mighty Heart, United 93) but Penn doesn’t give any suggestions of what will happen, even though the film is hardly linear. This left me somewhat shocked by how abruptly the film ended.

This also seems a remarkable statement about how much I was enjoying the film up to the end, but I can’t pretend that the ending of a film isn’t powerfully important, true or not. This seemed to be the complaint about the ending for No Country for Old Men, but I believe there is a very significant and important reason for that abrupt ending (even if I haven’t figured it out yet) whereas the ending of Into the Wild left me feeling slightly cheated. The Christopher we meet along with many passing characters, is played remarkably convincingly by Emile Hirsch, who is likeable beyond the point where the film allows Christopher to be flawed. Penn’s script and direction seems to be admiring and yearning for the simple and insane life of Christopher, and for that reason we are never quite allowed to see him as slightly mad. Instead he is almost prophetic, and so convincingly so that it is difficult to watch him fail after making bad decisions. There is a sentimentality that Penn uses to approach the material. He is more concerned with other issues. It makes me wonder what the film would have been like had the insanity/passion-obsessed director, Werner Herzog, directed the film.

The main problem with the film’s sentimentality is that there is still an objective approach to the way the film is told. We are not given any more insight into Chris’s intentions than he vaguely describes to the people he encounters in his journeys. We hear more from his sister (Jena Malone), who describes the changes in their parents (Marcia Gay Harden and William Hurt in two one-dimensional melodramatic roles) which is made significant to contrast the lack of information about any changes in Chris. Although his exterior certainly changes as much as his lifestyle, his outlook seems just as careless and naive at the end as it was in the beginning. What is remarkable about Chris’s journey is the relationships he made along the way while working to make some money, camping in the desert, or passing through a town, Chris has an innate ability to make friends. These are some of the most enjoyable sequences in the film as well as some fantastic performances by Vince Vaughn, Catherine Keener and Hal Holbrook, and each time Chris leaves these engaging and believable relationships behind the film seems to suffer a little as a result. It grows increasingly difficult to relate to Chris as he dismisses all that care for him.

The 2-Disc Collector’s Edition simplifies the special features, keeping them exclusively on the second disc and extremely simplistic. There are not a large collection of options, but instead just a basic making-of documentary split into two parts.

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Into The Wild (2007) DVD review written by: Ryan Izay

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