The Grey
- 3 days ago
- 2 min read
Movies about people who crash or are stranded in a remote part of the world are my catnip. Survival thrillers like The Lord of the Flies, Gravity, The Sands of the Kalahari, The Revenant, and The Edge are some of my favorites. These stories never fail to wake up the 12-year-old boy who still hangs out in the basement of my soul. In no time he’s wide awake, breathless to see what happens next as the hero fights to stay alive.
And sitting right next to him is the 72-year-old man I am today who gets much the same giddy rush from those stories as well; not only for their grand, high adventure but also for the swift current of deeper meaning about the human condition that often flows through the best of them.
The Grey is definitely one of those movies. Made in 2011, it stars Liam Neeson as a grizzled loner named Ottway who works at an oil pumping station in the Arctic wilderness. He’s a sharpshooter whose job is to kill the hungry wolves that threaten to attack the oil workers out in the snow-covered fields.
Who would work in such a cold, hellish place? In Ottway’s words, the men who work here are “men unfit for mankind.” Each of them is haunted by some loss, grief, or trouble that has driven them to this dark end of the world. Ottway included. About himself, he confesses: “I’ve stopped doing this world any real good.”
But as hostile as the world is for Ottway, its fangs are about to come out and make things much worse. A plane that he’s on with some of the other workers crashes in a blizzard. Everyone aboard dies except for Ottway and six other men. With no food, no shelter, no hope of being rescued, the men argue about how they’re going to survive. That’s when a ferocious pack of wolves appear…with hunger in their bellies and blood in their eyes…and the men stop talking…and run.
What follows is an intense, relentless gauntlet of terror.
The ravenous wolves pursue them, of course, and what follows is an intense, relentless gauntlet of terror. As the bitter cold bears down and the wolves keep coming, the men weaken with every step. They begin to debate whether to give in to the inevitable death that’s all around them or fight back and defiantly cling to life. For me, this where The Grey becomes a thrilling adventure story that also packs a punch as an allegory about the confrontation with mortality that awaits us all.
When the wolves close in on us—whatever wolves they may be—will we wither and surrender? Or will we summon the courage to remember what’s worth living for and keep on fighting as long as we can? I give The Grey three and a-half stars out of four.
