Liam Neeson plays a heartbroken and suicidal guy who shoots wolves for a living in Alaska. The plane he's in crashes in the middle of nowhere, and ironically he and a few other survivors end up being hunted by wolves and they try to make it back to civilization. The plane crash sequence was fantastic, and the way it occasionally cuts to him being held by the woman that left him (to die, as it turns out) whenever he looses consciousness is both touching and creepy, as it then cuts jarringly to imminent danger as he wakes up. The location is also great: the windswept snowy flats and the forested mountains of Alaska. Unfortunately the filming style of the movie doesn't always make the most of the location, as most of the shots are quite close. It could have done with a few more long shots I think, to show how small they all are compared with their surroundings. That being said, there were many nice closed in shots too, especially at night. The closeness of the fire and the huddled men, with the darkness and the glinting eyes of the wolves closing in around them.
There is a lot of playing with perception in this movie, and it's really quite thoughtful. In one scene a man lays dying after falling from a tree, and he sees his daughter standing over him. She bends over and her hair brushes over his face, but then we cut to the point of view of the other men in the tree, and he is being torn apart by wolves, and it is their fur that he feels on his face.
My two favourite scenes are when Ottway is gently helping a man in the plane die peacefully, and when they let Diaz give up. He's decided to sit down and wait for death rather than keep on with his broken ankle, and he seems so strong and sure of himself at first. As the other two prepare to leave, though, he breaks down and starts crying, and tells them that his first name is John.
The open ending is great, and I stayed on for the final scene after the credits. We see his head, resting on the wolves body, as it breaths heavily. This could mean that he killed it, like in one of the first scenes where he shoots a wolf and rests his hand on it as it breaths heavily until it finally dies. I don't think he survived, though. Maybe he won the fight, but I'd like to think that afterwards he just collapsed on the dying wolf and never moved again. If anyone ever found the bodies, the bones would be all mixed up with one another.
The Grey: 49.6